Normal Service Resumes

 We just got back from our summer holiday. Wonderful, then stressful and frustrating because our car broke down on the two-day trip back to Calais. Still, it was an amazing trip. We spent most of our time in the Vosges mountains in Alsace, with a travel route that included stays in Belgium and Germany. 

Civilian Radar Station on the highest peak of the Vosges mountains (Le Grande Ballon)

Driving onto a train is weird

Ypres museum diorama. Good dioramas are ace!

So, normal Blender service should resume in a day or two.

Raptor - quick request

 Gabe asked me to help make scale adjustments to the previs version of a starship's bridge. Not a lot of creativity, but a good exercise. It was clear that the source model was exported from either a game engine or had at least been optimised into a triangle-based model. A horrible starting point if you want to make edits! It took a couple of hours to cut the model in half, then turn it back into quads for adjustment, then separate so that some parts could be turned hidden.

The director approved the changes but requested adjustments to some railings because there needed to be more space for characters to move around a command table. Then, while I went on my holiday, Gabe remodelled the command table a bit.

The NDA prevents me from showing anything off, but it should be pretty cool.

Wednesday project

This morning, I decided to invest a couple of hours into a mini-project before returning to the big stuff. At work, I'd been watching the crafting of a simple -- but really elegant -- deck chair. One that slots together rather than uses complex pivots and hinges. I recreated the chair from memory -- making some errors through the process.

 I originally had the seat slats sit flush on their legs, but when flush this way, the seat element doesn't get held in place when the two elements are stored or carried flat --without the overhang on the slats, it just falls through the back frame. You really understand a thing after you try to build and use it (virtually, in this case).

True-Sky render

I tried using Physical Starlight and Atmosphere, but I got crashes, so I tried True-Sky 3. It's great for landscape shots, though its rendering trickery does result in an overly soft output in many cases. PSA is better for a studio-style subject...when it works.

True Terrain 3.2

A fix for Blender 5.2, although I spotted and raised some issues. This could be a corruption of my installation. Blender 5.2 is turning out like Blender 5.1, a bit crashy, maybe as a result of changes to the API.

Film spooge 26

 The first day of the summer break started with the last work shift until September. It also included an early showing of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Oh boy!!!

This film is yet another masterwork from Nolan. The familiar mythos is here, but Nolan's adaptation feels grounded and relevant. Nolan's two familiar devices- the unreliable narrator and non-chronological flow- feel natural and fully at the service of the film's thesis.

The mythological elements are framed as Odysseus processing guilt for his civilisation-ending crime, which reminds me of Life of Pi. Each encounter places Odysseus and his crew at the sharp end of the very breach of Zeus' law that he himself is guilty of at the sacking of Troy. I suspect that this film is going to bag a lot of Oscars. Rightfully so. It's already proving that audiences will travel to the cinema when they have faith the film will deliver something special.

Summer break begins

Word of the day 

Capriccio (Ca-Preech-Oh), an Italian word for fanciful/fantastical, originally used to describe a piece of music.  I'm shocked that I'd not heard this before. 

Goals

I am going to use the Summer break to do an absolute shitload of good things. Making this list, for starters. Followed by some of the list items themselves, probably. It's not all Sunshine and Blender, I need to be doing other things. Earning some money might also get added to the list.

Blender School - RGB Masking

I wanted to paint a mask straight onto a terrain, and not just two separate materials; I wanted three! But how, you might ask? 

1. Create a very large new image 4k/8k to avoid pixelation, call it "RGB Mask"
2. Create a simple "base" setup with some colour-based materials and plug them into the surface output using nested Mix Shaders. 

3. Add a Separate Colour node to your RGB mask; each colour plugs into the factor input of your Mix Shader nodes.

4. Now, when you paint using pure Red, Green, and Blue on your RGB Mask image, these will translate into three masks.

5. Use Node Wrangler to quickly add PBR texture files to each base colour.  Touch up the mask to position and blend the different materials for improved realism.                                                                                                                                                                                 

Very rough, but you get the idea

The Great Blender Refresh -- Nearly there!

Things got busy at the end of the week. I did some messing around in Blender, but nothing useful or serious. Most addons were installed successfully, with some noted critical exceptions. Those exceptions are getting sorted quickly:

Geo-scatter has been updated for Blender 5.2, and the early testing is positive.

Flower Power - Geo-Scatter 5.6.4 for Blender 5.2

True Terrain 5.2 -- Richard has confirmed via email that an installation issue has been identified and a fix is coming soon.

In the days and weeks after a release, add-ons often see updates. I believe some addons I installed and declared working have received updates, possibly due to edge-case issues that didn't affect my quick test.

Can't say fairer than that. Honestly, I totally understand why you would wait until release day to review and fix issues, though it makes sense to be aware of when a new release will cause a break during the release candidate week.

The great Blender 5.2 Refresh (continued)

 Getting Blender 5.2 configured and augmented with all my many, many favourite addons is quite a big job at this point. What can I say? I use a lot of add-ons.

Addons

Fluent -- Looks to be broken. I've removed it for now, as it was one of the suspects in last week's incident, where the release candidate would instantly crash when opened. I initially thought it was Geoscatter as I know that its developer doesn't update the addon until after the official release.

Fluent has been off the boil for a while, and its developer, Rudi, has been taking time out. I've sent him a message through Superhivemarket.

Extra Curve and Extra Mesh objects (Extensions)

True Terrain 5.2 -- Boom! This error occurs when it is finally installed. It looks like another user is reporting the same errors. Removed for now. Dang it, TT5 is a lynchpin! I hope we can see a quick fix, given that True-VFX has had to reduce its development intensity since Zach moved on to a new job.

Normal Magic (pro) 2.0.1 -- little used, so probably shouldn't install yet, but seems okay

Alpha Tree 2.4.7 --- seems okay, beware Library path, as I had to create a new placeholder.

Arborea --- Seems okay. Nice. I should use this brilliant addon more.

OCD 2.5 --- Okay

Retopoflow 4.0 -- Okay

GrassWald --- Boom! Needs an update!

Zen UV - 5.3.3 --- okay, Core reinstalled

True-Vault --- okay! 

Panel Cutter --- okay!

BY-GEN --- removed from Superhivemarket along with all of the other Curtis Holt addons. He is selling through Gumroad only, now.

Rock-It V2 --- hmm might work. I see an error, but the base mesh turned into a lovely rock nonetheless.

Light Wrangler 4.2.29 --- Now an extension. Looks okay.

Extreme PBR Nexus --- urrgh, this is a tedious addon to reinstall. So many giant archive files containing their high-resolution texture maps. For some reason, you can't just point the add-on to the installed files; you need to go through installing from the archives each time. These archive files seem brittle and are prone to errors. Pah, it looks like a really good addon, too. Or just maybe this works now?

PBR Texture & Material Generator --- seems okay

ToOptimize Tools --- seems okay

I take a break for lunch, my morning consumed by this laborious effort. I also realise that I'd not installed a host of important addons on Blender 5.1.x. Maybe they were never that important. More likely, I've not been working far outside of a niche set of tasks for a while. 

Blender 5.2: Ding ding, round-2!

 Blender 5.2 is officially released. It's time to have another go at getting it configured and all my most-needed add-ons installed.

Trouble from the start

I've had a lot of trouble with the latest version of Blenderbase, the very handy utility that lets you install multiple concurrent versions of Blender, which is essential if you want to use the latest version for play and testing while doing mission-critical work on earlier versions. It appears to be built on Webview2, which allows developers to embed HTML/CSS into a Windows application. All well and good, but my installation is forever freezing, lagging or crashing.

I really want to use  Blenderbase, as when it works, it works really well. I'll soldier on and hope the performance improves. If not, I'll look into repairing the Webview2 components.

More addons

DecalMachine - Point the assets at the path "E:\Blender\Assets\DECALmachine-Assets\"

Engon 1.9.1  - Add path to the paq files rather than install them from scratch.

Render Raw 1.3.9 -  Add more colour transforms, maybe?

True-Sky 3 - Disable Light Tree under the Scene Parameters.

More tomorrow. I'm beat!

                                                                                                                                                 

End of Term

 It's the final week. My final day is next Monday, but the boys will end their school year at lunchtime on Friday. 

My sister, Tracy and her youngest child have been visiting, so I've mostly put down tools and spent time with them. They're off to spend some time in the Peak District, so I will be catching up over the week.

High Bradfield on Sunday

Start of Week

Last week was not very productive. No progress made on Halo: Raptor. There was a warning from the director that we needed to create some quick-turnaround previs environments to meet the needs of mocap capture that will be happening soon. I've not received any new work requests yet. I'll soldier on with the shot002 work.

Personal project

Monorail system. Quick and fun. Happy with the results, so far. I need to finish the rail system and build a cab.

On a whim, I decided that the cab would be more sci-fi than on Chiba's actual monorail system.

Blender 5.2

The shenanigans with crashing to the desktop after installing a bunch of add-ons really threw me off my stride. I have held back on installing any more addons. I'll possibly wait until tomorrow's official release, with a final batch of bug fixes, before having another go.

Blender 5.2 Release Candidate

The release of a new major Blender release is a good time to complete a fresh installation of all your add-ons. 

Start with mission-critical things. Check it's all working okay before going the whole hog, especially if, like me, you have a dizzying number of add-ons in your stack.

Mission Critical Changes:

Copy Attributes Menu -- an addon that lets you copy and paste attributes, which is really useful for matching stuff like modifiers. (see Docs)

Enable Node Wrangler -- nuff said!

LoopTools -- old stalwart, now added as an extension.

Bagapie -- Archvis toolset 

Sanctus Library -- The amazing procedural material library

Creative Flow ---

Random Flow --- 

Clean Panels Pro ---

Engon ---

Geo-Scatter ---

[Edit] I came back to complete the add-on installation in the evening, but found that Blender 5.2 would crash to the desktop when started. I removed the AppData Roaming directory, after which Blender would start up again. To me, this suggests that one or more of the above add-ons is breaking the installation. Clean install of Blender 5.2 starting again, tomorrow.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Personal Project: Monorail over terrain

I need a rail transport system to give my recent terrain scene a focal point. Easy enough! I started looking at Japan's monorail systems.
                                              

Photo by Kazuya IRE (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sujitetsu/)

Poles

Cableator-generated rail system

Railings on the rail system