Conceding defeat!

This morning I had another crack at Gabe's Gaea terrain. It was a closer run than I expected, but the assignment really was about which tool gives best-of-class results. Gaea wears that crown! I still think World Creator is a brilliant tool, and it is still capable of amazing output. It could be that the deficiency of my WC terrain was down to a lack of skill on my part, but that's fine.

To be clear, Gabe's output has been given the Full blender treatment. This was a test of terrain quality.

World Creator's interactive capabilities let you "paint" your terrain. I LOVE that.

So I will be investing a lot of time in learning Gaea...from the ground up!

Random Flow test scene

Yesterday, I mentioned using Kitbashing to finish the test scene quickly.

KitBASH!!!

Today I will be pulling some of it back and doing some cleanup. Plus adding pipes. Lots of pipes!

A deep dive into Cableator

Firstly, a progress report on the terrain...

I'm pleased with the topology in general. The snow mask is a bit leaky, so it isn't bright white like I'd hoped. The ridges are less pronounced, Gabe's mountain is less nuanced, but it sells the landscape better -- it just looks authentic. Right now, I'm thinking of conceding and retooling to use Gaea. Maybe I'll give it a second pass, but it will need to wait. In the meantime, Gabe issued an update to his terrain. <I make a face>

I think I will be getting to grips with Gaea very soon. Gaea 3.0 early access is due out next month.

Back to the Random Flow personal project

I decided to throw a lot of design elements into the Random Flow structure -- like I said, you need to balance random greebles with stuff that shows clear intent, tells a story, and/or presents recognisable, realistic elements that set both scale and context -- like ladders, doors, lamps, etc.

To this end, I don't have time to build many custom models. Instead, I gathered some models I've built over the last few years and stripped off some elements for a kitbash. I don't do much kitbashing because modelling and designing are my thing. This is a good example of where having a library of bits is useful for getting something out the door.

I want to add a bunch of realistic pipes and cables to the structure. This part I will build, but I will call upon the aid of some Blender addons - firstly, Cableator.

Let's do a deep dive:

Blender-School: Cableator

Documentation: https://cablerator.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Do you need an addon in order to create a curve, edit its start and end points, then make it into a solid? No, but if you want it to be really quick and easy, then Cableator is way ahead of the curve!

For openers: two ways to make a cable

1) Create a cable by choosing endpoints. This is the most straightforward method.
2) Draw Cable by drawing a path. This gives you more path control, but it tends to be erratic, adding lots of control points that make your cable twist in ugly, broken ways. 

Create a cable (Docs)

1. Click on polygons to define start and end points of the cable. Hold Ctrl/Cmd to snap to polygon centre;

2. Adjust cable width with S, cable tension (length) with D;

3. Hold Shift while changing values to make values more precise;

4. Hold Ctrl/Cmd while changing values to snap to 0.05 steps;

5. Change other options like twist mode, resolution and subdivisions;

6. Left Click to confirm the cable;

• If there’s a cable selected before creating a new one, the same cable width or profile will be used by default;

• If there’s a curve without width selected before creating a new one, the same curve will be used as a profile;

• If there are one or two endpoints of a different curve selected, these points will be used as starting points;

• If another bezier curve point was used as a starting point, there will be an option to join the curves with J key;

• Press Q while in modal to quickly add another cable;

Draw a cable

1. By default the cable will snap to visible geometry. Press D to switch between Surface and Cursor pen depth;

2. Draw with Left Click-Drag;

3. Undo with Ctrl+Z;

4. Confirm with Right Mouse Button or Esc;

• If there’s a cable selected before creating a new one, the same cable width or profile will be used by default;

• If there’s a curve without width is selected before creating a new one, the same curve will be used as a profile;

Editing Cables

• Width (S): width of the cable.

• Tension Delta (D): changes the cable tension (length).

• Resolution (F): cable length resolution.

• Tilt Cable (I): tilts the cable and automatically recalculates tilt values for all points.

• Bevel Resolution (V): cable profile resolution (if no curve profile is used).

• Scale Profile (T): curve profile scale (if a curve profile is added).

• Offset the Closest Point (Shift+W): offsets the point closest to the mouse cursor.

• Grab Profile (B): grabs a profile from the active doc or from the ext doc (switch with Shift+B).

• Twist Method (H): controls how the curve twists in 3D space; changing this can help remove curve artifacts.

• Show Wire (X): toggles Wire mode on/off for the curve. Wire mode is turned off on finish.

• Fill Caps (C): adds caps to the ends of cables.

• Set Bevel Object (A): assigns a profile to the cable.

• Move a Point (M): reattaches the point closest to the mouse cursor to a different face of any object.

Create a complex-form cable (ribbed cable)

1. Create a cable where you want the complex cable. Scale it down so it's not visible. You only need the path.

2. Create the rib section out of a cylinder. Remove the end cap faces after creating an inset.

3. Scale the cylinder, bevel the edges.
4. Select the cable, bring up the Cableator menu and select Add or Edit Segment.

5. Use Array (C) to bridge the path.

You have a ribbed cable! So dang easy!

Simulate

Select the meshes before selecting an existing Cableator cable to add them as collision solvers. Then, when the simulation runs, Blender does its level best to account for realistic object collision. It doesn't always work, but there are tools to improve results. Even so, a tweak here and there is much easier than manually staging realistic cables.

1. Create a cable and complete it.

2. Select meshes with which you want the cable to detect/collide. 

3. Run Simulate.

4. Probably fix. There are some post-simulation options that can help improve outputs. 

The game's afoot!

 Gabe has provided a Gaea-created terrain that I will attempt to match in World Creator. He's not gone out of his way to make this extra-difficult; it doesn't use any wildly complex erosion forms. However, it's still shows that Gaea output can just look very natural straight out of the door. This could still be a challenge.

I should have specified that the results should be shown in Blender, because the test is for terrain forms, not Gaea's native rendering/materials capabilities.

 Gabe's challenge. See his work: https://www.artstation.com/gabe_dobsky

Start of the week

Last week's aims:

Scene 002: I made progress by going to the asset preparation. Mostly the city and the depot, which are close to completion. That's a tick! I will finish the scene this week.

Superhive trades: Some thought. Nothing structured, nothing like a plan. Given that I paid out a fortune to get a porch roof repaired, I really need to focus more on bringing in some money. Put this into this week's aims.

Blender School: I actually looked into two areas:

Random Flow
I followed the more recent tutorial, and I have a practice exercise, the results of which I will show off tomorrow. It's still an amazing tool, but you need to use it right; too many users think it's all you need for surface detail, but it's got to be balanced with designed elements, or it looks obviously like a lot of random greebles.

Panels, Extrusions, and Slices. Scratching the surface of Random Flow!

HardOps/Boxcutter
Oh gawd, I think I have completely lost all the knowledge. I struggled to do something really basic with Boxcutter, and the notes I created in this blog didn't help much. A proper refresher will be required. Frustrating, but at least I know it's an issue.

This week's new aims:

Complete Gabe's challenge, today. Strict time-box! I need to complete Scene 002, this week.

The Random Flow practice exercise: Today/Tomorrow. This is a personal effort that shouldn't bleed into the working week, but if it isn't finished by the end of tomorrow, it won't be. One of the reasons it didn't get finished is that I am trying to be a lot more active during weekends. I spend much of one day getting out into the world and taking photos. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lucasdigital/

Photography

Some of yesterday afternoon's efforts:

City Centre from Parkwood Springs

Looking back towards home, from Parkwood Springs

Moments of Clarity

Yesterday, something happened. In a single moment, a destructive/wasteful thought-cycle went from all-consuming to nearly gone. Is it gone for good? We will see, but it feels good -- it's weird because we can end up clinging to these things, like an injury you feel compelled to keep prodding, until you almost feel like you need it.
 

Metabolic Clarity

I'm starting a ten-day period of continuous glucose monitoring to look more deeply into my metabolic health. I check my blood glucose levels a few times per day, but these snapshots can miss the bigger picture -- are insulin spikes happening between my checks? What's happening through the night? Maybe my regular waking up at 3am is down to glycogen exhaustion. Maybe not. We will see.

Blender

Scene 002

I made good progress at the end of last week, getting the city mostly done. I placed the city on the terrain and found that I'd underestimated the elevation changes, so the outer part of the city sits below the landscape. Next week, I will create a terrain cutout of the city area, add it to the city file, and find a way to map the city correctly onto the ground. I can also use this to better handle the city border, making the city's edge more gradual.

Tomorrow morning, I will do a Star of the Week post, looking at what was missed from last week's aims and what needs to be added next week.

Terrain therapy

I keep forgetting that the latest version of True Terrain has a broken loader for mask files. I confirmed this by loading up a backup earlier version of Blender and creating a terrain with masks. You'll see how the mask colours the rock debris correctly.

True Terrain 5.1

For now, True Terrain 5.2 displaces the mask files so they don't line up with the corresponding topology. Note the textures are different, but the masks are consistent, and you can see how the boulders and pebbles are painted onto the wrong places.

I hope team True-VFX can put out a fix soon. At least I have this workflow fix where I can do the initial creation in Blender 4.5, then load the terrain into Blender 5.2 to continue with working masks.

True Terrain 5.2

Blender-School: Random Flow

 The city I'm building for Scene 002 continues at a slow pace. I realise I could save time by using Blender Guppy's excellent Random Flow add-on. It's great, but I always struggled to remember how to use it effectively, so lets get into it...

Documentation (updated recently after a significant change to the add-on's UI)

Random Flow

"Random Flow is a random mesh generator designed for fast and easy hard surface prototyping and concept art. This is a fast-changing add-on with lots of new functionalities in the future."

For science fiction environments, you often need to model a lot of surface detail that isn't particularly purposeful. Often, you are breaking up empty space with geometry and lines. Random Flow lets you quickly apply surface details by creating face-based panels and extruding them.

Once installed, you bring up Random Flow's master panel using Shift+F1 (see above).

• Usually, Random Flow details consist primarily of Random Panels, which break up surfaces without significantly changing the form of the target object.
  
  
• The details created depend on the size of the target faces; larger faces produce larger panels, while smaller areas naturally yield smaller panels. 
  
  
• Randomisation is applied to generated/floating elements that are cut out of the target object, ensuring all changes are non-destructive. Randomisation can be applied in Object or in Edit modes.

Random Panels Page 1

Random Panels Page 2

There are a dizzying number of parameters. As Blender Guppy says, he could make the tool simpler, but such an effort would rob you of incredible fine control. 

The operator presets are a great addition; I should get familiar with the effects of each one.

Stressy

 

What a strange creature is man, that he would choose to cage himself so willingly.
- Masamune Shirow (Appleseed)        

In a Dr Frankenstein move, I took my generative-AI head and placed it on some other generative AI-bodies. Cool, eh? <lightning strike>

Due to strike action, I am doing my work in the morning, so I can be back to see what damage the builders have caused. I am getting the skin-crawl feeling I experienced with dealing with conmen in the past. I will be watching them like a hawk. 

City build

 Scene 002

I'm taking a break from the terrain materials. Yesterday I took Gabe's previs depot model and shrank it down into something I could place into the scene. It definitely works better than my rushed lash-up. I may need better materials.

Next, I started to build out the city on the island/coastline. Creating a low-poly city that has enough detail to be sold as a real place requires quite a lot of mesh noodling. While slowly setting up a base mesh, I was aware of how well Blender Guppy's Random Flow would handle mid-level details. 

I haven't used Random Flow for a while, and I've forgotten the finer details of its procedural system. I should watch the recent beginner's video about it.

True Terrain Material Testing

Looking at the pre-built material, which I intend to do a breakdown for:

True Terrain 5.2 (there's more)

 I found another bug! Something stops rendering, resulting in an error message that warns that a blog directory was not cleaned up. Fortunately, manually deleting that directory allows rendering to continue.

The True-VFX guys are on the fix. Hopefully, TT5.2 will get a corrective bugfix-focused release quite soon.

To celebrate its release, I should create a quick terrain scene render. Ha ha ha ha ha...<that's so peak ADHD leaping onto another project>

True Terrain 5.2

 

I spent a lot of time on the terrain in scene 002. Not much to show for it because render times are fairly long. I hope to add a couple more layers to the materials without causing the blackout problem, which is reportedly being fixed in Blender 5.2/True Terrain 5.2. 

A snippet of Scene 002

I check that this is true, and discover that True Terrain 5.2 is OUT! What the heck!?!

<a few minutes later>

True-Terrain 5.2 installed okay. I did a render test. Okay. I created a new scene and got carried away with the polygon count, probably 200 million polygons. Hard crash with a system reset. <glum>

It seems stable when I don't get carried away, although new scenes appear to present a bug when using masks. 

The mask should match the displacement, but by default, it is offset. I raised a bug on True-VFX's GitHub.

Scene 002

Maximal effort today and the weekend to push the scene forward. I will see if I can add a coastline and maybe some mountain tips, with darker rock and snow.

Is it scatter time, yet?

Blender School: A look at rock scatters 

I still feel like I need either a system, an approach, or a workflow for handling pebble scatters. Geo-Scatter is an amazing tool for managing instanced terrain scatters; it has so many features and functions that I don't really understand, so I never use it. Deep-in-the-weeds GeoScatter practice should have been on the cards a long time ago.

Better...but not looking as natural as I'd like.

Clump Distribution

Changing to Clump Distribution often caused Blender to crash. This was probably because CD is expensive. A CD scatter places a mother object, then some child objects around the mother. It's great for dense formations, but you need to start with modest scatter densities, or you will exhaust your system and likely crash.

Temp rocks in the scatter. They do the job when scatter tweaking

The official docs are honest about CDs' cost:

JUUUUUUUUUNE

 Shout-out to the BBC sitcom from my childhood, Terry & June. Many, if not most, episodes would end with hapless middle-aged husband, Terry, in some comedic high-speed crisis calling out for his wife, "JUUUUUUUUUNE".



So it goes that hapless middle-aged Blender user, me, calls out that we have already arrived at the Middlemonth (t.m). Where does the time go? I can never find it, except in my failing memory.

I'm going to make Monday mornings my Start of the Week report, where I plan what I'll commit to and deliver on the upcoming week. Just like work! Maybe I should do a Start of Month too, but let's learn to crawl before we run a Marathon.

Scene 002

Progress is being made slowly. But it is progress! I'm still not satisfied with the materials, as they're being applied. Let's do a proper evaluation, comparing what we've got with what we want. They think about what needs to be done to bridge the gap. The effort has felt too much about vibes and feelings. "Do I like this?" doesn't get you onto the next step.

We potentially have a new Environment Design lead. I should compile a list of questions to see if I can extract wisdom from the possible new team leader.

Aim: The material must be completed this week; in fact, dressing should be progressing, if not complete.

Side note: Gabe has been busy finishing an interior environment, so he hasn't produced his "challenge" terrain using Gaea. I eagerly await his challenge!

Superhivemarket Trades

I need to start making money on the Superhivemarket Store. The website I set up is going to cost me another lump sum shortly. It will cost much more than I earned from the product I created. I need to make way more products!

Things I can make:

Terrains: This time, I'd create actual baked scenes rather than just displacement maps. 

Space vehicles: I can make some cool ones. I think that one loosely based on Project Hail Mary would sell quite well. 

Planet: I can create giant planet maps. I could create a pack of 5-6 for £10

The aim this week is to develop a plan, not to rush into production. The aim should be to deliver something by the end of June.

Blender School

I think I need to start revising and push to complete more training on new things. I've forgotten most of what I learned about HardOps, although I think it would come back quickly.

I've not used Fluent or Random Flow in over a year. They're a mystery to me now. This is why writing down new procedures is so important to me; it serves as a quick memory aid, as opposed to redoing the work, which takes longer and often goes wrong. A case in point, though. The use of Render layers, which I thought I'd effectively recorded in a post, got me very stuck. I missed some critical element that seemed to reset asset visibility when shifting between layers.

Photography

I've had a small dip in productivity because I have been making use of the great weather, getting out and taking lots of photographs. So much so that I am glancing sideways at new cameras. <Slaps own wrist>

Loxley Valley from High Riggs