More project work progress

 I spent most of today tweaking the previs terrain for the service road. It's now reasonably close to the ARMA 3 storyboard. Matching a 3d model up with the output of a game engine is a weird way to do this. Artistically constraining for questionable reasons, but a great exercise in the technical side of environmental design. Is this close enough? We'll see!

Stand-in character placement

I created each canyon wall with a cube that I extruded along the undulating path. I then stripped away all the geometry except for the inward faces, which then served as a geo-scatter target for various test assets. I ended up with a chunky piece of wall that I created using Rockify.

Manual placement to (mostly) match the storyboard

Lens sim FTW

Bushes

Overview of the key area

Character placement might be tricky with the current small boulder implementation. Looks quite nice, but I might need to push them back into the wall to avoid limiting the animators.

Downing tools for now

Terrain project work

 I recreated a section of the terrain used in the film project. Alas, it wasn't close enough to the reference model, so I'm rebuilding using a more precise one.

 

Nice shape, shame it doesn't match the director's requirements.

Arma3 game area reference

 

Routed mapped directly from the ARMA 3 reference

World Creator sculpt

Floor section

Next, I'll build proxy cliff wall assets, then rocks and trees.

For the cliff assets, I have been experimenting with both Rockify and Rock it V2. 

Back from our summer holiday

 We have returned from our week in Brittany. What a lovely place! So less commercialised than  Cornwall, with which it shares a vibe and some Celtic heritage. 

I took a few photos of beach rocks. Hopefully, I'll get some half-decent rock texture maps out of them eventually.

First bash!

I'll get back to Blender tomorrow. Today we'll finish off our washing chores.

Things I want to do:

• Complete tutorials for some of the new tools I picked up recently. There are a few, and if I don't learn how to use them soon, I will forget I have them and never use them.
• Complete the previs terrain elements for the film project.
• Build a big spaceship.
• Complete a big terrain scene to help cement the lessons learned from my recent environmental art training course.

Rock it! V2

 I bought an addon a few weeks ago called Rock it! It's a nice procedural rock generator, like Rockify.

I went to see the documentation before giving it a test and discovered that a separate v2 has been released. I was annoyed that it was released as a separate add-on, but it looked much expanded and was relatively cheap, so I bought the new version. If I had read the page more thoroughly, I'd have discovered that you can get it for free if you already have version 1. Ho hum!

So here's an overview of Version 2

Rock Type (1-9)

Choose from the following types of rock materials:

Resolution:

Sets the mesh resolution. Higher means bigger meshes, more detail, more resource-hungry.

 

Scale:1 with 86,000 faces

Scale: 3 with 3,357,000 faces

Extra Shapes

Places outcropping rock onto the underlying mesh.

Adjust the scale and density of these outcroppings.

S:3/D:3                                       S:7/D:4                                         S:4/D:7

Small Detail breaks up the surface of the mesh using finer details.

Small details

As you'd expect, Large Detail applies larger structures on the surface of the base mesh.

Large details

Suzanne Res:5 with 0.1/0.2 scale on small and large detail

Odd mesh. 

Early thoughts

This is a great little tool that has a lot of potential. The library of rock types and parametrics gives you nearly unlimited rock variations. Although getting exactly what you want will require some tinkering.

Terrain sculpting

 I'm currently focused on completing previs terrains for the Sparrow Films project. As I'm still working on this, it has sapped my general Blender time. Just a few things, here and there.

16km terrain test

Scatter practice, home-made rocks become mini trees or bushes.

Rock it! v2 test. Nice!

I need to put some notes together for using Rock it V2. It's very good, but the rock formation tends to appear as a regular pattern that doesn't look particularly convincing. It's been a while since I tried Rockify, which is also good and offers a similar workflow.

I'll post some Blender School content after work. Yesterday, I learned a nice workflow for setting up a camera rig, but I didn't quite get it working because I was animating on a path without placing the camera on the path correctly. This was all because I wanted to create a quick walk/fly-through animation of the latest terrain.

Not the last shift

 Apparently, we're in until next Wednesday. Although it's the end of term, they keep the school running for three training days. Never mind!

I did another sculpt. I like this one ..enough.

The next one has some cliff dressing. Megascan assets that are just placed along the terrain's wall to add real-world rock formations. Nice!

Last work shift of the term. Summer Break!

 One more shift between me and round-the-clock Blender!

The film project work hit a dead end yesterday. I did an update terrain and shared it with the team. It needed more oomph. For some reason, the terracing had disappeared as part of my efforts to increase cliff steepness.

Another iteration!

I worked up yet another version, this time ensuring the terracing wouldn't get blown away during the process. 

There's a little bit more sand buildup at the base of the cliffs than planned, but without it, the cliffs don't look natural. World Creator's sand simulation's minimum sand goes from nothing to a bit too much. 

Pumped up with some post-effects

Last week of term

I break up from my part-time job at the end of the week. It's then Blender all the way down...well mostly. We have a family holiday coming up, but I intend to be very productive over the summer break. I might even make some money again using Blender.

Blender 4.5 is now official

After a good month of testing 4.5, it has now entered general availability. So far, so good. It's fast and ...mostly stable. I suspect that a number of my commonly used addons will require some updates. 

Recent Work

A planet map...a bit of a change

Lens Sim practice

A depth of field test

Suddenly

I have a new production task on the animation project. I need to provide a terrain for the previs animation. Interesting!

A work in progress. Some changes have come from the director, but I had a good time confirming that the workflow is effective:

1. World Creator sculpt.

2. Export EXR heightmap.  
3. Blender/Import the EXR into True Terrain 5. Create the terrain material.

4. Bake the required terrain resolution, then bake the material maps. 

5. Decimate to reduce resolution for production

Stable test

 

Did it crash? Not yet...

A good sign, but this episode of multi-dimensional instability was a punch to my enthusiasm. I walked away from the environmental project for a bit.

Optimisation started

I developed various materials for the light rig, aiming to rig it so that it can be set up quickly in different configurations.

Athena Asteroid -Physical Starlight and Atmosphere sky

Thinking about a return to my Orbital Elements game over the summer. Next week, Blender 4.5 goes into full release (hopefully), and the road to Blender 5.0 begins. Exciting, but hopefully things will be more stable.

Environment Project - Part 1: Woe time

 Suddenly everything grinds to a halt. I was getting constant problems with my scene not accepting parameter changes. I'd adjust something, such as the exposure setting, and my change would be instantly removed.

AttributeError: Writing to ID classes in this context is not allowed: Scene, Scene datablock, error setting option.running

Info: Saved "DreamlandSheffield01-Blockout06.blend"

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "C:\Users\mark\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\4.5\extensions\user_default\TrueSky\scripts\DevOps\ui.py", line 519, in _set_toggle_input

    self.input.default_value = int(value)

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Then I'd overcome the problem by saving and restarting Blender.

This morning, I removed Blender 4.5 and reinstalled the latest build, so my copy should include the fixes from the last week.

So onwards!

 So far, so good. Now, the area where the city is going needs to stretch out more. I couldn't get the horizon line high enough. My lensing is off! I need to use a longer focal length to bring the foreground in and stretch the view into the distance.

Better! I also added a simple plane to create the flat open areas (a plane) for the city.

Only I then got CUDA errors...

Maybe the scene is too big in terms of the render area? The plane and background terrains are enlarged, not to scale so the view stretches off into the 20,000m range. That seems excessive; it really should be all done in a 10km stretch.

I restarted and made changes. Removed the distance terrains from the final render. Only to crash on startup.

# Blender 4.5.0, Commit date: 2025-07-10 00:47, Hash 4a68512db9fd

# backtrace

Exception Record:

ExceptionCode         : EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
Exception Address     : 0x00007FFB9920F255
Exception Module      : python311.dll
Exception Flags       : 0x00000000
Exception Parameters  : 0x2

    Parameters[0] : 0x0000000000000001
    Parameters[1] : 0x00007FFB98FDFF8B

I restarted my machine and did some basic renders. Seems fine for now. The most likely culprit is that light rays are going out too far. I know that problems like this have been fixed before by enclosing a scene without a box, to trap light rays that might zoom off to infinity and beyond.

I may restart the build later with a view to keeping it smaller.

Environmental Scene Project: Pastoral Sheffield

 I once had a dream in which I lived in an idealised pre-industrial Sheffield. From my cottage on the outskirts, I could see the familiar skyline, with a handful of towers projecting from the built-up city centre, but everything was leafy and rural, with elegant stone-clad buildings. This dream happened years ago, but it created such a sense of dream euphoria that I became depressed on waking. A severe case of H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands, a place people go to that becomes more real and more important than their waking life.

What a subject for an environmental project. One that will pull together the lessons I've gained so far from Piotr Krynski's course.

Midjourney

It started with a Midjourney output that evokes pleasant feelings of familiarity. I particularly like the Gothic mansion in the middle ground. The City isn't quite right, but I can work on the details as the scene gets put together.

First, I need to break down the terrain elements. These are the most significant components, and it's crucial to get the scale right if you want lighting and environment to behave realistically. It's not that you can't fake it, but you might end up where you need to add too many fake or botched elements to overcome inconsistencies in haze and overall lighting.

Foreground: A steep element that supports a single tree and a flowery meadow. This area can support densely scattered grass.

Middle ground: Fields and dense copses break up the elevation ahead of a grand building at the top of the hill.

Background: The most complex element is the plain broken by hedgerows and individual trees, which leads into a city element, which fades into the background several kilometres away. 

Rough blockout using random terrains

This could be best done on three plates: Foreground, Middle ground, and Background. This requires more planning and effort to coordinate, but you can utilise all your system resources for each element, resulting in a final scene that would be impossible to render in one shot. Challenge accepted!

So I'm going to start by sculpting three separate terrain elements.