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

New week, new start, new washing machine

 Week beginning 6th July.

I had a moderately successful night of sleep, waking, as I do, just before dawn. Porridge and coffee has powered me through getting the boys off to school and, just now, overseeing the installation of our new Hisense WF3S1043BW3_WH -- they need to stop using codes and switch to a pleasing mnemonic system, making it something like "Hisense Washer-Starfish-Indigo-Square-3"

Wifi Washing?!

This unit is Wi-Fi-connected because, of course, you need to control it using an app.

Start of Week (6-July-26)

Last week's big fail was making no progress on the city model. I just found other things to do, mostly Gaea-related. I made a start on a personal project without first forming a proper idea. I installed and played with the latest version of Random Flow. No big changes to my workflow.

This week:

• Team meeting with the new head Env Artist, Brannan. Exactly when is still to be decided. It sounds like there is to be a discussion of the viewpoints of my terrain scenes. I hope this is just a refresher on what was previously agreed and not some kind of very late-in-the-day change that will greatly impact the scenes. That said, shot002 is so hard because it's taken from such a high altitude. 
• Get that city finished.
• Finish a personal project. Something small!
• I need a refresh of my environmental design skills. It could be timely to redo the training course I bought this time last year. (Efficient Environmental Design - Piotr Kryski) Also, finish installing and evaluating a whole slew of add-ons that I bought in bundles but hardly touched.

Grassy

Busy weekends

 Blessed are the weekends that keep you moving and stop you from overthinking (too much). This may be one such weekend. Clara is working night shifts, so I have a bit more cooking and cleaning on my daily to-do lists.

Our washing machine is no longer able to discharge water effectively. It's given us a good decade of service, so Clara has decided to skip the "get someone to fix it" stage of appliance grief and move straight to accepting that we need a new one.

Gaea 2.3

More Gaea experimentation and practice. I've seen a lot more instability than I expected. Yesterday I worked for several hours on a moderately complex terrain tree, only for Gaea to cause a hard crash (black screen of death "your system needs to restart") 

It then confounded me further by forgetting my license information and blocking 8k-resolution builds until I went to the Quadspinner website and reactivated my license. Weird! My account now acknowledges that I have a Gaea 3.0 license pending, which is good—a sign that early access really is coming soon... probably.

Clouds on the horizon

True-VFX, the developer of amazing Blender add-ons, provided sad news this week: Zach is moving on to a new job. Richard will also be looking for alternative/supplementary work away from Blender. This is sad for users and fans of their work, but it seems like a growing trend in the Blender add-on development space—building complex add-ons and selling them for a one-off fee is no longer viable over the years. The economics of maintaining and developing those add-ons based on a one-off cost isn't working, as sales growth (very strongly) tends to drop to a trickle. The Superhive market initiative to build in/enforce a support payment model isn't popular because Blender's community is addicted to the word "free", and is maybe too little, too late.

Both True Terrain and True-Sky are great as they are, though the latest version of True Terrain has a bug that fundamentally breaks my workflow because image masks no longer align with the heightmap. While you can move the masks to manually line them up, in practice, there isn't enough clarity or control in the viewport to do so reliably. I hope the guys can make a quick fix to align with the Blender 5.2 release, due in a couple of weeks.

Blender 5.2

Release Candidate due on Wednesday.

Introduction by Decoded:

Key changes:

• Thin walls -- a change to shaders for supporting very thin materials.
• New dynamic cloth solver -- Blender improves physics with a dynamic solver for cloth.
• Collider -- a new collider system for physics interactions.
• Texture Caching -- better management of VRAM when building a scene.  
• Loop tools -- finally become a default set of tools. Long overdue, apparently.
• Compositor can use  GPU acceleration.

Gaea School: Masking Rivers

 Masking Rivers

So you want to export river masks? Not too hard. Here is an example node-tree:

1. Create your terrain. Add Rivers (obvs!)
2. Portal out for colour outputs. Add a TextureBase which intelligently masks different types of topology, such as slopes.

3. Add a portal to the Rivers node from the Rivers output. You can export this directly for your mask, but if you want an integrated colour map, use two SatMaps one for the ground and one for the river, then use the River node output for the mask on the combine node.

Colour output (combined)

Rivers mask output

Source tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLWplfkYDdQ

Blender output

100 million polygons and lots of maps. Work-in-progress for sure.

Onwards into Quintilus (or Septimus)

 Harsh week. Back pain. Chronic sleep deprivation. Stresses and strains. We endure!

Diabetes

I'm off the medication, handling my insulin resistance through diet and exercise alone! Yay! Now to stay on the straight and narrow, so that my next HbA1c test continues to show me below the pre-diabetes range.

Halo: Raptor

I chatted with the director about my progress with Gaea. We're looking at using Gaea for my next scene. In the meantime, I will be doing some quick test terrains to see if I can muster the right type and quality.

I also need to finish the city. For this, I need to grab the terrain beneath the city and create a copy of its topology so I can properly map the roads onto it. Currently, much of the city's surface level is sunk below the hills.

Now, let's see if I can break out of my disconbobulation and get some productivity.

Time to get back to work

 

I feel like I have put one foot through the doorway into the Gaea terrain creation. Its node-based system and impressive selection of erosion systems make it a preferred choice for complex terrain. Not in every single case, but in general.

Spot art for a Facebook group I belong to:

True Sky 3 and some old models

Start of Week 

Last week's aims:
Complete Gabe's challenge - tick! I conceded and moved on to the next aim: learn Gaea. That's another tick! Also, refresh my Random Flow skills. Tick!

This week

• Re-engage with the Halo: Raptor scene 002 work. There's a conversation happening with the env team.
• Take another look at Random Flow -- there's a new major release out. I'd better get it installed and take a look.
• I desperately need to complete a small project. A fully-fledged but simple-ish scene.

Gaea 2.3: More basics

 After tinkering for a few days, I feel like I've come a long way with the basics, while recognising how much deeper you can go. Watching artists like Maarten Nauta build node trees that are ten times larger than mine, I can't quite cogitate how much nuance I'm lacking in my builds.

There are still many areas I need to learn:  

Combine:

Fully understand the Combine node. It's about the most important of all nodes as it controls how different nodes are mixed together through blending modes:

By default, Combine blends equally between input nodes. Alternate blend modes are like Photoshop blend modes -- same maths:

BlendBlends the values of the two inputs.AddAdds Input2 to Input1.ScreenAdds Input2 to Input1 without overexposing the output.SubtractSubtracts Input2 from Input1.MultiplyMultiplies Input1 by Input2.DivideDivides Input1 by Input2.MaxSelects the higher of the two inputs.MinSelects the lower of the two inputs.SqRtThe square root of the two combined terrains.PowerUses Input2 to create exponents of Input1.DifferenceCreates the difference of the two inputs.InsertInsert relatively flat and isolated shapes into an uneven surface, such as sand dunes, while retaining the flatness of the rocks..EmbedEmbed any shape into any other terrain by performing a height-preserving add function.

Output

Outputs are clamped by default. This means the output is bounded between 0 and 1, preventing odd side effects. Remove Clamp if you think the blend is removing too much displacement, but use the Autolevel feature from the Enhanced drop-down.

Keyboard shortcuts: https://docs.quadspinner.com/Guide/Interface/Keyboard.html

Better terrain blending: I need to learn how to mask!

See Modify Shapes.

Rock scatters: Another feature that appears to be stronger in Gaea than World Creator, although not by much.

Biomes: How to create different landforms through masking -- I assume that it's mask-based, like World Creator.

Materials: I've hardly touched materials because I use True Terrain for that. I should still get some hands-on, given that Gaea appears to be really good at creating surface weathering.