MSVAs Sketchy progress

 The space vehicle sketching continues.

Project: Hail Mary provided a ton of inspiration—mostly for the multi-rod form. For MSVAs, this sets the expectation that vehicles are built on open frames, usually a longish stem to which vehicle components connect. 




I think this applies more to bigger vehicles than to the small rigs, but it is a reasonable ground rule.

I'm going to keep sketching over the weekend, then I'll start breaking components down to see how they might apply across lots of vehicles. There needs to be a range of options for each component type -- not a single type of vernier thruster, but maybe two or three in each of the three classes (small,medium,large). That's what I think at the moment.

A point of inflection

 Halo: Raptor

The news of Microsoft's closure of Halo Studio and its transfer of the IP to Activision has, unsurprisingly, plunged the project into fear and uncertainty. I think Raptor will likely continue, with an adjusted aim point, since Microsoft can no longer provide a path to a web series production. I might even prefer a worse scenario, where they develop a whole new IP. Clearly, Halo has a huge following, and anything Halo automatically generates interest. This automatic interest comes at the cost of creative shackles; you're very constrained in what is a pretty derivative (Aliens blended with golden-age sci-fi) universe. A fresh start could open so many interesting new doorways, without significantly changing the story we intend to tell.

We will see!

I'll keep punching out iterations of the service road terrain, although I am struggling to get the fine detail I crave. I'll keep trying different approaches.

WC-Gaea-Blender workflow practice. Something quirky happened...

Reduced displacement looks better, but it isn't what I was aiming for.

MSVAs

I'm enjoying the concept creation phase of the work. Sketching and thinking, usually fueled by coffee and occasionally cake. The Modular Space Vehicle Assets line is tied directly to the Orbital Elements (OE) universe. Killing two birds with one stone, if you will. This means that OE provides design constraints, while the Blender modelling end provides OE with some ship designs, if not a ship kitbashing system.

A mid-sized space ship vehicle (In OE, we don't call them ships)

I still need to take a decent of Noah to use with Hitem3D for his Attack on Titan commemorative render.

A Blender sketch I made while trying to persuade my 11-year-old that it was bedtime. 

whoopsy

 I fat-fingered the build of a new Gaea terrain for Halo: Raptor; instead of setting its resolution to 16k, I set it to 64k by mistake. The result was a very, very long build time, which exhausted my system's storage before it finished—about half a terabyte. I had to cancel and delete the cache files. Phew! Lucky I didn't corrupt my system.

I'll try again tomorrow. I feel like I just can't get the density right.

Concept sketches for MSVAs

Gaea School: A return to the Vosges mountains

 We're taking a break from the usual diary format to do a deep dive into a complex Gaea setup. This is based on the sample provided by the brilliant Maarten Nauta.


The following graphic shows how deeply nuanced and interesting terrains are generated from massive graphs, that are literally too big to view in totality in the graph editor.

Look at the size of this graph?!

1. The base terrain noise

This stretch of the Vosges mountains is built on a Perlin noise base, which is then eroded (Er2), and the result is squished using two transform nodes.

Perlin - Erosion - Transform1 - Transform 2

The transforms change the scale of the erosion patterns and can move them up, down, and around.

The next block begins with a Chokepoint node. Apparently (because I've never used one), this is how you combine collective graph inputs without a long processing tail—it's memory efficient.

Chokepoint

Next, the input goes through a warp, which adds subtle but specific noise patterns. The Warp is masked to the lower reaches of the terrain with a Height mask, which is applied to a Combine node that blends the Warped input with another Perlin noise node.

Meanwhile, a Snow node is applied to a height-masked area.

No node quite like a Snow Node

Masked lower reaches

The result: subtle levelling of the downcutting.

Time for another family to join the tree(graph)

A Mountain node is added and gets quite a lot of jiggery-pokery.

Mountain -> multiple terrain bumps

The mountain node goes through multiple transforms, which combine to create a cluster of mountains; each transform is additive, so one mountain can become three.


Three Radial nodes are combined (blended) into a mask that acts as a mask, so that small portion of the terrain gets a messy height boost.

Not easy to see, but the radials create a slight rise.

A Draw node adds another terrain bump, followed by the next Erosion2 node, then outputs to a Chokepoint Node, labelled "baseshape".

Next up: Apply Fractal Terraces on a sloped area, using a blur for the modulation and a slope for the mask.

Terraces, but only on this sloped area. Clever!

Erosion 2, again.

Thermal2 node applied, with an exclusion mask for the fractal terrace area.

Mask

Creative masking in the next step: Take the Thermal2 output and create a mask that leaves a flow trace on the slopes, like so:

Creative masking

The result

Next new input terrain: A sandstone cellular structure:

Another elaborately set up mask from a flow adjusted every which way, then combined through a Bomber node. A Bomber node is a scattering and stamping tool that takes an input shape or heightfield and "bombs" (multiplies and scatters) it across your terrain surface.

Another set of targeted (via slope nodes) tweaks for Thermal Erosion and Roughen. 

The biggest takeaway for me is the importance of masks, mostly slopes, in this example. This terrain is, on reflection,  too big for a single article. Most of the remaining graph is pulling out  specific regions for colour treatment and material output.

Moving into the colour space for materials and masks.

More on Gaea, soon. This weekend: Some more personal project stuff. Possibly more on the MSVA.

The never-quite-finished Shamrayev. MSVA-like construction.

End of an era: we finished Attack on Titan.

 Noah and I just finished watching Attack on Titan, a brilliant, complex fantasy anime series.  It's awesome and leaves you with a lot to think about, with themes like human nature, war, violence, politics, and freedom, among others.

I spent some time working on the scene I created for Noah, featuring a great wall inspired by Attack on Titan.

Wall updates

I'm taking a pristine array-generated wall and adding random damage by adding carefully placed (not actually random) boolean cuts. 

Wall from a distance

MSVA

A starting point -- a single "spine" on which modules are attached. The Project: Hail Mary space vehicle has three separate spines, joined to an engineering module.

Space vehicle layout

Tyr's day

5.2.2 due

Today, another Blender update should drop: 5.2.2, which I imagine fixes any serious bugs uncovered since 5.2's release. I was surprised to learn that Blender 6 is entering Alpha. Blender 6!!!

Start of Week (missing from yesterday's post)

Halo: Raptor

I am still beavering away on the test version of the Gaea-generated service road area. This week I will work out a better strategy for adding lots and lots of undulations around the service road canyon. Right now, all my tests are too sparse and too flat. Getting more density might require a more procedural approach, rather than manually painting the terrain.

Modular Space Vehicle Asset Set (MSVAS)

Allow a couple of hours (this week) to plan the next steps. I think that the first thing I need is a design language for the space vehicles, which are part of my 2288A.D. Orbital Elements universe. Once I know what a 2288-era vehicle looks like, I can start planning how many engine pods, how many cargo pods—that sort of thing.

The big inspiration right now is the Project: Hail Mary space vehicle, which looks like a real thing, and yet looks cool. <I just grabbed a link to the original design by Paul Chadeisson, which was on his LinkedIn account, but found that my account has my old email address as primary. So I tried to change my primary to a working address, but got stuck in a loop trying to update it...>

Not this, but you get the idea

Blender School

I need to do more training/learning/practice. There are so many things I could or should be doing. So many that it's now impossible to choose what to do. Nature Generator? More rock sculpting? A newer addon that I've hardly touched or even forgotten about? Come up with a training timetable for the month, then jolly well stick to it.

Therapy

You guessed it. Terrains...endless, almost pointless, terrains

Workflow: World Creator --> Gaea --> Blender 

This is becoming a bit of an old chestnut—a bowl-shaped terrain you can plonk the camera in the centre and do a 360-degree pan without the terrain suddenly vanishing.

Wider (20mm)

They're not bad, but I really need to get the masks in True Terrain matching again. Maybe I should beg Richard to take a look at it when he has time?

Time-off, Time-out

 I'm resting a bit this weekend.

Watching TV

Clara and I started watching Apple TV's adaptation of Hugh Howey's Silo novels—which I haven't read. I wanted to watch it because it looks like it will help me with the development of my Orbital Elements project - research into living in archologies. It's a great show! By episode three, it reminds me of Lost: a mystery show that uses flashbacks to broaden its storytelling palette. Less so here, as the flashbacks stay within the confines of the Silo, while Lost had this amazing global setting. Rebecca Ferguson arrives late to her vehicle, only appearing in the final moments of episode one; how very West Wing.

By the end of episode three, it's clear that Ferguson's character is a fellow neurodivergent. It works! Ferguson has a knack for physicality—the nods, twitches, and sudden loss of constraint that could look manufactured—but it always feels authentic. It's the same acting superpower you see in play when you watch Barry Keoghan. I don't know where that level of physical coordination and control comes from. I get how a musician makes an instrument an extension of their body—lots and lots and lots of practice—but I don't understand how great actors can measure and learn to express themselves with such nuance. Magic, I guess, or lots of video cameras pointed at them while they rehearse.

TV 2026: Everything looks amazing because of clever creatives with computers

The Silo doesn't just have a great troupe of actors (whispers: so many British/European thespians!); it also has brilliant art direction, staging and craft. The place is fascinating and convincing. It reminds me of an essay I read about Utopias, and their limits. The Silo is a spatial utopia: a society can be an emergent quality of the living space, and if changing that space threatens to change the society, then such a utopia will fall to totalitarianism. Silo, right now, hides this fact behind rituals and a shared fear of those who would try to change...anything. 

Blending

Saturday morning's effort: create some strange statues for a future project using Hitem3D.

Hitem3D Marble Athena Statue

Shipping containers are a recurring subject for a quick modelling effort. The first one I built in SketchUp, when it was still Google's excellent free modeller.

Shipping container modelling. About 2-hours work

I'll be using it as the basis of an environmental design project, one day, week, month, year soon.

This morning

Before heading out for a walk, I created a base terrain in World Creator and imported its heightmap output into Gaea, creating a 1GB eroded bowl.

Imported into Blender/True Terrain 5.2

At a wider (25mm) focal length

A bit dark, eh

I'm still looking at ways to reduce True Sky's and True Terrain's combined habit of making terrains a bit sludgy, soft, and dark.

Whoosh. Another week flashes before my eyes

 It's flown! Here we are on Friday, seemingly moments after Monday's close. This might be the power of routine. Compared to the Summer break, everything runs on rails of routine, so you stop noticing the flow of time.

This week

Progress on the Halo terrain. I need to start a third iteration of the canyon/service road element. This time, I need to spend much longer filling in the land above the canyon with peaks and undulations. My main beef with the previous two attempts is that they don't include enough terrain detail.

Cheeky to show (NDA) but it's rejected, right? So it illustrates the lack of detail around the canyon.

Train travel

Clara and I took the train to Worksop because our broken-down car has been towed there for repair. We dropped off the service documentation at the garage and lugged most of our luggage back. While waiting for the train, I snapped photos of track maintenance engineers because their safety packs look really cool, maybe a bit Sci-fi.

Rough source!

It struck me that the figures would be a good test of Hitem3D. Exactly how usable would outputs from quite poor sources be? A test worth doing, I thought. I  wasn't expecting this to work at all -- look, his feet are essentially missing!

So that worked out pretty amazingly...

The first engineer with the best photo is the best by far, and I think it shows. That said, they are collectively very useful for background elements. I'm impressed! Also, a bit scared of what this does to the 3D industry. There's going to be a whole lot less work going forward. 

Fluent back in the house

The hard surface modelling tool, which wasn't initially working in Blender 5.2 looks to be fixed.

Quick test element: some tiny issues on the mesh, as usual.

Apparently, I bought this add-on in the opening weeks of the Ukraine invasion. Since then, I  have used it occasionally. Mostly, I get into a mess and need to learn how to make the most of the mesh/normal repair tools. Occasionally, it's done an amazing job.