GeoScatter update and it's Friday

 

Geoscatter is finally compatible with Blender 5.1. Better late than never, Geoscatter! :-) 
This is great news! Although I have happily chugged along with 5.0.1, and will do so for Sparrow Film work -- because it's our production version. That said, you need to keep up with changes and improvements, so I try to work on the latest for my own work, unless there's a specific roadblock.

Big Terrains Done with Tiles

I note that nearly all the huge terrains that I've seen built have consisted of terrain tiles loosely slapped together. Apparently done right, you don't need to worry about seams.

That theory appears to hold up!

I have a lake tile. I just need big mountains to go behind the lake, then the canyons to go in front. It will be sorted soon.

Thursday runtime/funtime

 I did an early run this morning. I was at the Morrisons supermarket at Hillsborough for its opening at 7am. I felt great, although I had to walk back to avoid damaging the stuff I'd bought, which included some glass cooking oil bottles. I felt great at 8, fine at 9, but by the time I was half an hour into my shift at 2, I felt like...a nap.

Lesson: Don't go for the first run in months/years and not expect some serious energy-level troughs through the rest of the day.

I was happier with the direction my terrain tests were taking, but not quite there yet. I will do another final test tomorrow, keeping the rises to a minimum and making the canyon channels a bit deeper and longer. The latest idea is to create a repeatable plate that can be instanced a few times to give the impression of a super-detailed area.

The terrain that I last rejected was still quite cool, so I had some fun dressing it.

High contrast, big rabbit

Foggy drama with bunting

Bunting for the bunny god!

Tomorrow: That training I was supposed to do. I'll do an hour or two.

Finish something: Hmm, tricky. This piece is finished; it's a quick play-around, not a full project. I do itch to build a space vehicle, but I'm too far behind on the Halo terrain efforts.

1 year on

 Today is the first anniversary of my part-time job. How the time has whizzed by with sickening speed. Time does that, these days. It never drags, it always stacks up air miles.

I'll treat my work colleagues to some sweet things.

Halo: Raptor

Time to have another go at the big broken terrain. Getting Canyons to look right has been tricky. I'm clearly not applying terrain deformation/erosion in a way that sells the realism. It's time to fall back on good references.

What I'm looking for is the river-carved-into-the-rock effect. Not like a valley where the slopes are gentle, it really just looks like river flow eats away the ground, leaving a flatish terrain interrupted by steep, deep canyons?

I thought about recreating the whole service road section within this terrain tile, but that seems like a lot of work that would mostly be wasted on an establishing shot. I proceed with a more general approach. I need to get the overall terrain right first.

11 Weeks, 4 days

 Here we are. Spring, 2026. The calendar people have been here for 23 days, while those of us who look at the Vernal Equinox, the point when day and night are equal in length, hit the milestone on the 20th.

There's more light, which is daylightful!

This week

I need to complete the next terrain section for Halo: Raptor. I spent some time over the weekend doing a larger-scale/higher-resolution sculpt of the broken terrain/canyon component. It's better than it was -- thanks to the use of multiple sculpt tiles, which increases the sculpting resolution limit from 1024x1024 to 4k. 

Sharing as I'm rejecting this effort. The scale is wrong and the canyons are too inconsistent. 

Complete some of the personal project stuff: Ships/House/Terrains, etc., etc., before starting anything else.

Complete some training content. I have oodles of stuff waiting to be completed. Complete something!

Terrain dabblement

The beginning of an Easter-related piece. It might get some Easter eggs, shortly

Blender School - blending object materials

 

Blending into the ground

There are techniques for placing terrain assets to blend with the ground material and remove obvious seams. The same technique can be used in other situations, but this scenario was raised by Drew, the director. Given that I try these things, then forget what I did some weeks or months later, I thought I'd make this a Blender School post.

Technique 1: Geo-Nodes (From James Combridge)

 Concept: Create a mask to apply to an object's material that checks the distance from the ground object.

Object info node that looks at the Relative position of the GroundPlane Object via the Geometry Proximity Node (distance). The result is pushed through the Stored Named Attribute node and is given the name GroundMask. Simples!

The Rock (object) material gets the Ground material added via a Mix Shader node using the "GroundMask" attribute we just set up.

For more control over the blend placement, make the following edit to the GroundMask:

Take the Geometry Proximity output and feed it through a Map Range, using its adjustments to fine-tine where the blend happens. You can further improve the look by adding another Map Range, mixing them (Mix node) using a Noise Texture as the factor.

Technique 2: Normal Mapping (From SpennyFX)

SpennyFX looked at an alternative to the above technique using normals.

First tip: These materials shouldn't be wildly different or the results are not likely to be convincing, at least close up.

This technique produces a more ambient-occlusion-like mask suitable for smaller objects.

The factor for the Mix node is the object's normal separated on the Z-axis and pushed through a colour ramp (default) that is adjusted to mix in the ground to the bottom of your target objects.

There's a third technique available that I won't go into here. It handles the blend as a compositor step. See more about it on the CG Matters channel.

Testing Blender 5.1

In spite of a number of quirky errors, Blender 5.1 looks functional. The only major addon that remains incompatible (as far as I've tested) is Geoscatter.

Small teams don't always have the bandwidth to update addons prior to a new Blender release. That's fine. I would maybe not sling mud, though. Blender has updated its underlying Python version. It seems a bit unfair to characterise this as "breaking" most addons. It's a major, breaking product change, but it's well understood and planned. It falls on addon developers to track and keep their products up-to-date.

I guess that Geoscatter will be updated in due course, and it's possible that Blender 5.1 might need a hotfix if any serious issues fall out of general use.

Breakthrough.. I think

 

World-Creator limits its sculpt tile to 1024x1024 pixels. You just can't make fine-detailed terrains or coastlines with the sculpt layer. Solution: Use an array of sculpt tiles and carefully blend them to create a seamless, high-resolution terrain sculpt. The coastline comes out so much better this way. 

The next challenge will be to blend this lake plate into a larger terrain with mountain ranges in the background and a canyon-like badlands in the foreground.

Blender 5.1

Is due to be released today. I tested the Release Candidate last week. It wasn't supported by many of my critical (True-VFX) addons, so I ended up not using it in anger.

[Update] Blender 5.1 released and installed along with a flurry of critical addons. It looks like most things are working. Geoscatter is one addon that looks to be awaiting a necessary update.

Other stuff I should think about

Finish something!
I have about six "projects" that are just waiting to be worked to a level of completion. Maybe get some of them done?

Do some more training!
I have a bunch of courses waiting to be completed. Some I haven't even started.

Terrain therapy

There's a new World Creator release (2026.3) that resolves the instability issues I experienced in the last build. I've enjoyed testing it because, if you've read any three posts on this entire blog, you will know that I love noodling with terrain. I just need to push myself into the less safe territory of finishing landscape scenes.

Mountain place

Strata slope

Lake under a ridge

Thoughts about massive terrain scenes

 This current shot has had me stumped. I think I know why. Very high-altitude shots are just a lot bigger than you think. At 1000m altitude, you can see 70km -- it's a Pythagorean theorem application.

70km is a lot of landscape. It's far more than you could ever see from the ground.

70km is about the span of the Alps

Break

 I didn't get time for any Blender, yesterday. A rare thing! I'd only had three hours of sleep and my head never quite made it to planet Earth.

I did some drawing for a t-shirt. It's based on a sculpture in the grounds of my son's school. 

It really is time to get this giant terrain scene done. I'm looking at how I need to change my approach to accommodate its massive scale.

1) Smoke and mirrors
I need to stop trying to brute-force full scenes with high-poly scatters. There really shouldn't be any scatters at this altitude.

2) Consider using render layers

Instead of doing the whole scene in a single pass, break it down. It takes a lot more planning, but it can be the only practical way of rendering especially complex scenes.

3) Look at what the top artists do
There are plenty of great Youtube videos that cover terrain scenes. There are a couple of courses too. I still need to finish one of them. (Ultimate 3D Environment Animation Course - Blender)

Roofy cabin progress

 

It seemed a bit premature to start worrying about materials, but I needed to add some oomph to the model in order to get a feel for where to go next.

I gave up on building my own furniture and used the ABO Connect add-on to pick a nice table and chairs from a library of nearly 8,000 assets. Phew, that was £3 well spent!

I think the window frames will be better in a darker material. Also, I might add blinds to the windows on the first and second floors. The roofing tiles are not quite right. The material is not quite aligned with the tile geometry. I think the whole cabin needs to sit on some decking, with a drainage system running along the bottom to drain the runoff, or you'd soon get flooded.

I am toying with the idea of rooms extruding from the roof, maybe along with a chimney stack. 


Halo:Raptor

I've been trying to find my massive-terrain mojo. I need to really take care with the same of landforms, my 32km-long terrains have the wrong scales for mountains, there are not enough big, long flows.

Scales are wrong. The canyons need to be a lot narrower but not so deep.

Near the Hoover Dam. This is about 30km long

Reality has mind-blowing levels of detail. Impossible to represent from a World Creator sculpt, although I could do much better to suggest the right layers of detail -- big forms that are not too uniform. My sculpts are just a lot of continuous undilation. Above you see the mountains having long drainage channels to the lake.

More observation required!

Ohh nice

Seen on the new Sanctus website. Weird moment. Nice moment!