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.

Aerial shot progress

 

It's about to get busy with Christmas, just a bit of time to tinker with last night's previs shot of the ship arriving. This version has the ship dropping down through the clouds. It's a slower, more plausible staging for a ship that is hundreds of metres long.

The calm before the Christmas storm

 We're back from visiting Clara's dad for a couple of days. It's almost Christmas Eve, and we have a visitor coming: Clara's brother, Chris. So it's all hands on deck; housework, food prep, and buying the last gifts—we're terrible, I know!

Still a little time for Blender.

Terrain sculpting and testing. I've expressed my dissatisfaction to the director about my aerial shot output. I need to construct some rough previs tests that can demonstrate different approaches to the shot.

Separate terrain assets: foreground and background

Big looming peaks in the background

Playing with previously discarded terrains...

 Quick pre-vis terrain animation...

Another concept...still to animate...

Ship drops through the clouds..

True SKY 3 Beta 7

Oh my word, what an improvement!

Improved clouds: Performance, UI changes, and additional cloud presets/types. More to come in the new year.

Christmas is upon us

 Every December, I seemingly stop being able to use a calendar and fall into a state of shock when it gets to about the 20th. I become dimly aware of the need to buy presents and cards and wear woollen jumpers that are tastelessly decorated in fir trees. I've arrived at that festive finding out phase of the month. I imagine that my Blender output will be briefly knocked back for a few days.

Until then...

Yesterday was tedious as heck.

I explored how to reinstall the custom (Quixel Megascan) terrain materials library for use with True Terrain. It really doesn't look like True Assets can place materials directly in True Terrain's selector. I could be wrong, but it's too late now. I spent several hours manually adding the materials. I'll add one more set of materials later, the colour-based palette set for lightweight terrains.

Quixel materials in the True-Terrain menu for the win!

I continue to explore big terrain options for the aerial shot.

32km with a telephoto lens. Shoot long!

I'm thinking that you get more bang for your buck if you shoot with a telephoto, narrow the field of view and bring the distant places closer. This lets you amp up the terrain detail into the distance because camera culling will remove so much of the foreground. I will do a test render with a nearly static camera and a ship flying through the view. 

Instability testing

True SKY 3 has a final update of the year coming on Monday. I'll hold back on testing more until it's in place. No point in testing a version of the product that will be gone before the engineers can look at it. The chaps at TrueVFX are working full pelt! True SKY is their flagship product. Even in early access, they want to make a great impression, which they have.

Happy Blenderversary

December 19th is the day I decided to learn Blender and start this blog! 

Lets go on a journey; a purge and reinstallation journey

 The Blender stability problems I've recently experienced could be due to multiple factors. The most likely three causes are:  

• Blender 5.0 bugs 
• Addon incompatibility
• New bleeding-edge tech like True SKY 3 (which we forgive because early access status is a developer's way of coming clean about a product not being "perfected".)

They could also be caused by my too-expensive-to-replace machine rapidly going Kaput... let's not dwell on that idea...


Note: It's 13 months since my last deep-clean. See this November 2024 post.

It might have been okay to see how Blender 5.0.1 works out before doing this massive and potentially painful task, but cleaning up is good practice. I was running with a lot of addons that are just clutter. I should only install the things I need day-to-day and then install other stuff as and when I need them. 

So for future purges, let's make a "shopping list" and some per-addon tips. 

Key Settings changes:

Default renderer: Cycles using GPU, Optix and Vulkan

Narrator: Although these settings were applied, he didn't select GPU in the Render tab and spent several minutes staring in disbelief as his fastest-GPU-in-the-galaxy appeared to crawl like an arthritic tortoise. Proper settings soon applied, thankfully.

Basic Workspaces: A new one for my version of tri-view, plus one dedicated to scatters, and one for asset management.

Mission Critical Addons

• Node Wrangler
• Copy Attribute Menu
• CleanPanels
• Loop Tools
• F2 Make Edge/Face
• MACHIN3 Tools 
• Grid Modeller
• Geo-Scatter
• True-Vault
• True-Assets
• True Terrain 3.1
• True SKY 3
• Cableator
• Bagapie
• Photographer

Nice to have:

• HardOPS
• Box Cutter
• Fluent Materializer
• Arborea
• Render Raw
• UV Flow
• G-Scatter

I had to remove:

• Engon
• Lens Sim
• Light Wrangler (proven to have an issue with True SKY 3, but now apparently a fix was just released.)

Both were causing errors in the logging that might be nothing, but could be related to the problems. I want both back; Engon is required for interacting with some assets. Lens Sim offers the best approach to real-world lens work.


Very not critical: Chocolate background #3D393AFF
I like the idea of Blender 5.0 being colour-coded so that I instantly know that I'm using it. This is important when you are trying to use an earlier LTS version of Blender for the film project.

Back to work

Testing for the stability issue soon revealed that it is still present. Possibly even worse. I could get a render error without even using scatters.

True TERRAIN down the drain :-(

I proved that running with Geo-Scatter and True-Sky 3 is not working for me, but I need to prove that running without True SKY 3 does work. To this end, I've set up a scene that uses an HDRI for lighting.

Blank out the HDRI output from the background 

I'm now down a rabbit hole of creating a half-decent scatter that renders OK, which I can then switch to True SKY 3 to prove it causes the render to fail.

It's a mess, so I'm having another try...or three.

I need to read more about how to scatter grasses and small plants.

Before I finish this, a new beta of True SKY 3 might drop, which fixes the issue. There's a new version of True Terrain due in the new year, too.