Back to the terrains

 I've been doing lots of sculpting and testing. I travelled down a dead end as I started looking at shots that fall outside what the director needs.

Director says, "Only the skies!"

Whoosh...goes the deadline

 The Christmas hols are ending. I'm back to work tomorrow, with an early start. This was the logical deadline for finishing the Shamrayev. Alas, I do need to move on as I'm committed to returning to the Raptor project, which calls for the urgent creation of some aerial concept shots. 

The command module lost its colour banding because you just can't get away with painting colour strikes just by painting mesh faces. The subject calls for more complex shapes with bevelled corners. It looks much better without them. Maybe I'll create a texture map with more complex go-faster stripes?

The first attempt at the "flag" seems okay. Is it too big? Having a flag is an anachronism because identification would be through advanced full-spectrum sensors at thousands of kilometres. But it's a cool way to include the vessel's colours and name. It feels like a worthy dedication to today's Ukrainian fighters.

I'm going to create new spin habs with improved cloth cushioning.
And I'll add some more details to the engineering block.

I started to do some clean-up. The hanger door elements were consolidated and can now open. I plan to do work on the hangar's interior as well as model one or more sub-craft, possibly two "shuttles" which I envisage as "space cars".

Shamreyev Details

 Okay, playtime is over. It's time to start adding bolts and buttons. 

Shamreyev's Big:Medium:Small modelling approach has finally arrived at small. Did I already do some small things? Yes, I nearly always step outside the build order for the odd thing. In real life, there are small things because some things need to be small. In modelling, there are small things to break up areas and add interest. A super tanker is defined by its big ship shape, but it needs those tiny railings and surface equipment to sell its scale.

I've decided to go with the streamlined command module and play on the idea that it can operate as a separate vehicle. I'm not in love with the design, but if I can get the surface details right, it will work fine.

Rescale

I'd decided that some critical ship elements are too small, it would be too cramped in the hab modules, and there's not enough room in the hangar for anything bigger than a family car. So I need to rescale everything. It can be a pain to use the scale tool on object collections, as you will need to reset the scale, and Blender may send notifications/complaints about every individual object that is instanced or related at Blender's data level. 

I believe the best approach is:

1. Unhide everything so that you don't miss the rescale operation. In this case, I made sure that my scale reference figure is not included, given the point of the exercise is to make the ship a bit bigger relative to the figure.

2. Create an empty cube. Place it where you can select it. I placed it in the centre of the ship and scaled it up to encompass everything. Resetting the scale, of course.

3. Parent all the ship's objects to the cube.

4. Rescale the cube, using its object panel to ensure the rescale is precisely right.

5. Reset the scale. Everything should have a scale of 1:1:1

6. Delete the empty. All the elements were rescaled, and the scale was reset without complaint.

Rescaled to +40% New total length: 304m

Even rescaled, those spin habitats are really too small for comfort. You'd get away with fractional simulated gravity, but to make them generate 1g, they would spin like the wheels of a car, and you would get very uncomfortable.

Details start to arrive. Some windows! Wooo!

I'll return to the modelling tonight.

First Friday

 This morning I worked up another terrain. Not for therapy! I really wanted to test out 64km of terrain. That is huge, and as I discovered, it's too easy to view from too high. I had the camera essentially in low Earth orbit (that's only 1-2 terrain lengths), which reduced the terrain to a very faint, rather meh. However, there was something else going on. It might be a bug in World Creator triggered by the extreme terrain dimensions or the shape layers. 

I'll try again next week. A 64km terrain is maybe too big.

Meh!

Shamrayev  

I came back to the Shamrayev this afternoon and immediately got stuck. I don't have a fully worked-out idea for the command module. I wanted either to dress it up or completely rebuild it.                                                                              

More mission pods, but they make no sense. But I do like adding a blocky area.

This is a bit more like the original 90s design but I wasn't feeling it.

This has a nice space tech vibe. I suddenly imagine the command module detaching from the rest of the ship and becoming a lander. It's outside the bounds of this project, so I'm only hinting at landing struts. I suggest adding some external engines. 

It's time for the final modelling run. 

1. Fine details - ladders, airlocks, lamps, etc 
2. Clean up and fix any obvious issues.

3. Optimisation and finalisation (applying modifiers).
4. Redo UVs and create some textures.

Suddenly, "nearly done" doesn't feel quite so near the finish line.

Day 1 Year 2026

 The year 2026 begins with a quiet day. Clara was sleeping off a night shift, so the boys and I had to sneak  around the house. I went for a walk for an hour and did some photogrammetry captures—nothing very good, alas.

Terrain therapy

More terrain sculpting. I needed a break from the Shamrayev, but I'll return to it tomorrow. I need to get it to a state of completion, as I'm already being called back to the Raptor film work. I'll produce an update to the recent aerial shot.

Two hundred and one: an unexpectedly elongated space ship modelling odyssey

 Here we are, standing at the gates of 2026. This was my unofficial deadline for the Shamrayev. Oh hum. Deadlines come, and deadlines go. There's no chance of a proper completion, as some areas require extensive reworking. That bulbous head needs to be broken up or completely redesigned. Even after all the materials and textures are done, I'll be adding countless lights, some of which I want to animate. Maybe I'll share a work-in-progress shot or test animation in the next few days.

Colour helps separate key elements.

Turning my attention to the propulsion system

On a whim, I decided to paint the superstructure a distinctive colour to see how well it separates visually from the ship's modules. Pretty well! That yellow is becoming a house style for my space ship trusses and structural elements. A developing house-style or a design crutch..hard to say.

This is so close to a first pass completion, but I can already feel a desire to:

•  Start chopping and changing the command module. I could change its shape a bit, or start completely again. The sensor pod needs a quick redesign, or at least some rearrangement. 
  
  
• The spin habitat drums want to be flush with the other modules. I could replace the padded elements so that they stick out more. I already said that I'd go back and replace those.
  
  
•  Most of the modules require textures and will also include displacement/normal mapping for fine details. Although some of the detailing will be modelled. Maybe some ladders and some balcony elements?
  
  
• Cargo racks will be attached to the central trusses. Not too much, not too big.
  
  
• I'll add some elements to the cable support masts. The top one might have a sailing ship-style sail that carries the ship's name and the Ukrainian flag. Those are elements that I should have included in my degree show version.

Tidy up and time to make final design changes.

2 0 0

 As mentioned, today's post broke the two-hundredth of the year. That's a lot of prattle farming! Quite a lot of incomplete terrain renders, to be sure.

Shamrayev Project

We're getting close to the end of the first pass. I feel like I need a break, but I also recognise that I'm feeling like walking away from a project because it's managed to sneak out of the feel-good zone by slowly accumulating design compromises and bodging the modelling.

Building really complicated things is hard and takes a lot of time and effort. When my patience wears out, I start to bodge things. You might notice that I'm no longer fighting my way out of the "box". This is where you don't work hard enough to hide the underlying primitives. The viewer can sense that you created simple forms and made some changes. Really good models look real, they look manufactured and don't betray that they started life as a cube.

Today is not a day to put my tools down. Let's get this thing finished. Once finished, it can be undone, repaired, changed, or, ultimately, discarded. 

Missing shield

Last thing yesterday, I was going to add some more detailing and think about what to do next. Something didn't look right... I have turned off the shield element. Nope! Turned out that I'd accidentally deleted it. Going back to the previous scene version is a quick fix, except that it isn't, because it was the last thing that I built. Oh hum!

So, this is nature's way of telling me, "Now do it properly!" The plan was to make the shield look lightweight but complex. I'd just sculpted a big block. This time, we'll build a complex sub-assembly, then array the thing into existence.

New shield starting point. Engineering mess

The engineering section is a visual mess, but I like it. What does it need to make it pass the test while staying messy?

I need to better sell the idea that those cylinders are plug-in tanks. I could incorporate ribbing into the connector elements to make them stand out from the main tank. I could add more elements to the retaining rings that show where the tanks connect to the engineering section. These contribute to the mess, but in doing so, they look like engineering....

V-Tanks (Volatiles)

Shield Array and Bigg A$$ thruster

These are not the most difficult elements; you can hide in the complexity. This should be easy! [Narrator: famous...last...words...]

• Don't overdo it.
• Think Big:Medium:Small just within this separate part.
• The shield shouldn't look like a solid mass, but it should have parts that make sense, such as water/ice bags and some plating.

I may post an update later if progress runs smoothly.

Centum Nonaginta Novem

 I just spotted that my next post will break the 200-in-a-year barrier. Wow! Blender is important to me, and that's evidence if it were needed.

Should I be coming up with some New Year's resolutions? Bah, they don't work except that it's always good to be reflective on where you have been, what you have accomplished, or not, and where you are going. People should not limit this kind of thinking to the first few days of a new year.

1. Sell more on Superhivemarket. Target: end of Feb 2026. I'll be paying for my website then, which will be a lot more than the money I made from the store last year. 

2. Improve things that go beyond Blender. Better attention to detail, more patience. Do more sketching. Those sorts of things.

3. More technical knowledge: Geo-nodes, rigging, master UVs (mwahha hahha hahah -- crazy laugh) 

Now I'm getting silly.

Do more training material. I've got the HardOps course to do. I stopped it because the first lesson was causing system crashes. Very off-putting, that is.

Shamrayev Project

Sails!

Nice! Daedalus-effect propulsion. [waves hands]

I liked how the sails were rebuilt. If there was one negative comment, it's that they now look heavy and carry more visual weight than I had planned. That said, this works, given that they are a kind of thruster system; they are not catching the sun's magnetic field, like actual sails, so we'll live with it.

Engineering

The next significant effort is to finish the engineering section.

First thing to do: ditch the ball tanks. This space vehicle is looking phallic enough without being equipped with balls. Instead, we'll go with a series of plug-in capsules. Tanks of volatiles

Engineering!

Thoughts on what's needed

Time to think about that shield disk. It's designed to shield the front of the ship from radiation produced by the primary propulsion system and is supposed to be a high-tech, lightweight substitute for a giant block of lead. It may have bags of water/ice inside. The fabric elements always look interesting, but they're costly in terms of rendering resources.

The plug-in tanks are kept simple, with only tiny surface elements and machinery in their end-cap recesses.

Those struts that extend from the disk to support the rear sail struts need to be engineered as an element. Let's see what cross-bracing struts do.

The cable mast should come out of this section instead of the shield disk. I'll make it bigger and more structurally complex.

Stability is still a problem with TrueSKY 3 and Blender 5.x. That said, yesterday I was able to reproduce a CUDA error with the Shamrayev model, though it didn't repeat after a restart.

I did a test of Blender 4.5 and True SKY2. Scatters are not a problem! As soon as I move back to Blender 5 and True SKY 3, its CUDA errors all the way.


I will test moving back to pure CUDA instead of Nvidia's OPTIX drivers.

Shamrayev Project: Critique deuxième partie

 I did a lot of work on those sails yesterday. Near the end, I had a sudden rush of blood to the head and created that very off-the-cuff angled arrangement. I liked that it wasn't just a flat plane, and the structural framing was pretty cool in places, but it just wasn't looking good.

Maybe I angled the sails in the wrong direction?

It's okay to respond to a sudden idea and go in a new direction, but don't be shackled to the idea. Here, I put a lot of effort into the delicate structural elements around the sails, all of which will be binned if I change this. But it isn't right. It must be changed.

What next?

Double sails look better balanced but more uniform.

Angled. What about doubled, mirrored, AND angled?

Better!

That feels like a "have your cake and eat it" moment; adding visual interest and engineering vibes without the overall effect being discordant and visually messy. I need to watch how the sails converge. I'll look at building an internal framework for the sails.

Progress!

I'll tidy everything up and then move onto the engineering section.

Shamrayev Project: Sailing along

 
I've some sails in place. Are they sails, really? The Daedalus effect turns electrical energy into thrust, so it's part of the ship's control and propulsion.

I'll have to wait and see how this double-sail design makes me feel later. It's more interesting looking, but it may be very odd-looking. It was very spur-of-the-moment as I placed the sail pieces. I'm struggling to select objects in the viewport and worry that I've some UI configuration in place that is tripping me up.

Boxing Day

 It seems like the family has decided to take a break from festivities to crawl into our respective safe spaces; Clara is doing her big jigsaws and listening to audiobooks. The boys are gaming, and I'm modelling in Blender while listening to piano covers of the Dune film score on YouTube. Good times!

Project Shamrayev is dusted off

It's been two weeks since I touched it. I'm finding it hard going but worthwhile.

More work on the command section after attempting, failing, and resetting the changes I made to engineering.