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.

Gaea School #2 More basics

 Basics Operations

There are some things that still cause me to get stuck. I create terrain, but then find that I'm unable to build because the nodes aren't flagged for it. 

Right-click the node and choose Mark for Export

Nodes need to be baked into discrete files before you can export a terrain. Use the Bake menu to select the appropriate nodes for baking.

I had a question about how to set the terrain's scale. It's under Project menu: Build Settings: Terrain

Terrain scale set under Terrain Definition 

For regular landscape creation, it's not critical. The default scale is 5km x 5km with a max height of 2.5km

However, for realistic scales, it really benefits you to set the scale appropriately. As the guidelines point out, Everest is nearly 9000m tall; such a giant terrain requires a larger underlying terrain tile.

Gaea School: The basics

 This morning, I intend to throw myself into an all-morning intensive training session to get an overview of Gaea's basic operations and workflows.

Gaea UI (v2.3.0.1)

Main Menu

On the top bar is Gaea's main menu. From here, you select:

File

Edit

Graph
Node

Preview

Tools

Help

Viewport

The top panel is Gaea's viewport, which displays the terrain you are creating. Note above that the map view is activated via the viewport menu, so that you get a top-down view as well as the 3d view. You can change the main view to 2d.

Viewport resolution. 1k by default. 2k and 4k are available, with corresponding performance costs.

Control the viewport with:

 WSAD keys: Basic movement 

Mouse scroll wheel: Zoom in or out

Alt+Left Mouse button+ Mouse movement: Orbit

Infinite Graph

Gaea's procedural magic flows from this node-based graph. There are many node types and rules governing how they can interact. This is going to take some time to learn.

The key points:

• Each node is a heightfield processor that performs a single task. By connecting several nodes, you can create an elaborate program or "recipe" for creating a complex process.
  
  
• Node graphs can only go from left to right, never the opposite. They represent a one-way flow.
  
  
• Split your terrain graph across multiple tabs using Portals and Chokepoints. This allows you to separate concerns, such as creating the main shape, colour production, and exporting masks. 

See Portals and Checkpoints.

Properties Panel

To the right is a vertical panel that contains the parameters for your selected node. This is where you tweak any available properties. It's context-driven, so the properties change depending on what node you select.

Watching Time

Quadspinner YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@quadspinner

Introduction to Gaea 2.0: https://youtu.be/3fGU98Hn5Us?si=xIjx6tBZ0hxWYgH9

Starter Guide Video - https://youtu.be/2BMOmQJTXsQ?si=GE2PPZdPapuvlY4a

Gaea to Blender workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcJmrgPHqGI


Another quick output!

Not to hard to use. Just so many options and parameters.

A Most Fallow Weekend

 I got almost nothing done over the weekend, except for normie stuff like washing, cleaning, cooking, and some exercise. 

Sidetracked while preparing a terrain for Gabe's challenge. A different sidetrack in itself.

Start of the Week (SOW)

Last week felt like grinding to a halt. This week, we'll turn it all around. Honest, we will!

1) Scene 002 Completion. The Director wants to chat about staging. Annoying that staging has been agreed for a long time, but we're still developing the scene's fundamentals. I can move the camera up a bit once the critical elements are done. They are: City and structures, materials, and scatters.

To this end, I need materials and terrain completed so that I can bake the terrain into a proper mesh, not a True Terrain object. I can then cut it into pieces and split it into 3-4 layers to break up the scatter elements.

2) Lots of Gaea tutorials and exercises. We'll be Gaea-proficient in a week. Honest, we will!

An output to Blender in less than ten minutes. V. gratifying!

3) Start a substantial but slow-burning personal project that has a strong possibility of making some money through sales in the Superhivemarket store.

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!