Ohh nice

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

Time-slip

 I seem to have drifted across the week, fulfilling basic requirements like eating, working and occasionally getting low-quality sleep. I'm getting behind with my Halo: Raptor commitments, so today is the day I start to turn that around, after a number of false starts.

Other stuff

I turned my attention to terrains...would you believe?!

Testing True-Vault assets

Brushed off a terrain sculpt from last year. I like! Let's scatter!

Na bad, but let's lower the P.o.V

Okay, but now we need some points of focus that aren't default cubes.

I'll whip up a quick model! Narrator: Quick models are never quick.

Posh cabin design - in progress

Next: Back to work on Halo: Raptor.
Then: Finish the cabin and place it into the terrain

And after that: Complete those PlantFactory tutorials, and some more of Cov's environmental training course, then, then.... Deep breaths and FOCUS.

Winter gloom begins to lift

 There seems to be more light and more moderate temperatures, which is raising my spirits a bit. The weekend was restful. I had jobs to do and got a bit of walking done. So work was due to begin this morning. Instead, I had some family issues to resolve, followed by a trip to donate a lot of old shirts that were too big for me.

Tomorrow morning, I will get back to work on the Halo: Raptor scene.

Terrains!

RiverEEn scene -- a test!

KrasnovMountains test scene.

Project progressus

 Earlier in the week, I installed PlantFactory to use it to generate custom plant assets for Halo: Raptor. This should help dodge the limitations of our very constrained asset collection. PlantFactory looks very powerful but very complex. So this morning I'm starting to learn the basics.

It looks like the old E-on software suite (VUE, PlantFactory, etc.) will be open source soon, which makes the time investment seem more worthwhile in the long term.

First big lesson: the plant collections are accumulative; you need to download and install all of them, not just the latest one. 

Sample tree ....oooh nodes nodes nodes!

Introduction to the UI

More soon!

Halo: Raptor

I'd got the shot's altitude wrong, based on the director's last comment, which he meant for the next shot, not the "next" shot. Nothing wasted, but I'm jumping back to the high altitude shot.

Back to work!

 

I'm settling back into the part-time job as I pick up my outstanding tasks for Halo: Raptor. To that end, I'm building an aerial/mountain-top view of a huge landscape. It's tricky because there's so much to coordinate within the frame. I might create a mock-up of my own to practice/test the workflow, which I can show here.

PlantFactory

Halo: Raptor needs to manage asset and addon licensing. This severely limits which plant assets are available for production -- the ones we have authorised don't match the Mediterranean biome of the scene. One solution I'm looking at is to use an industry-standard plant creation system that permits the use of generated plants in commercial projects. PlantFactory looks like an ideal candidate, except that I've never used it, and it seems like a lot of work to learn. Here goes, though.

Better schedule a few tutorials.

While PlantFactory lets you build any kind of plant, it apparently doesn't include Blender in its integration options. So I bought an addon. 

BF2B (https://superhivemarket.com/products/pf2b)

This looks like it will cure the headache of transferring your green things into Blender. We will see! 

Proper break, what!

 I didn't intend to take a break from posting to this blog all week. Inconceivable!! I have been a bit productive. Not much, but some. I've been catching up elsewhere. Housework and a return to my part-time job yesterday. Visiting family and having family visit will dominate this weekend.

Terrains, of course

Lowland 512m

I create so many terrains, but I don't properly record them for selection and reuse later. I captured some outputs of one or two from the start of the year. I must do more!

16km Mountain Range

I created a quite satisfying mountain range, though I didn't add snow masks. I've always felt snow-capped peaks are a bit of a cliche, but to be honest, they are the way you communicate "this is really high".

An overview helps, but not as much as you'd think.

Autibus: an experiment with a gentle slope running along a 2kmx1km rectangular terrain.

This is nice. Time to do a quick terrain scene with trimmings.

Half-term break: Real-life stuff to do

 Yesterday was the start of our half-term break. A week to take stock? Maybe for some. I'm decorating Leo's bedroom. I have slowly grown to hate decorating. Over time, as you ply some skill-based activity, your standards and expectations grow. In an ideal world, the development of your skills and competence grows to match. When that doesn't happen, I find myself less satisfied by my efforts, until I just can't shake the sense that everything that you do is complete shit. Lucky for me that Leo doesn't have any standards and won't call me out on anything that turns out wonky. Clara, on the other hand... 

Sparrow Films/Raptor

I can show some developmental elements here. The next scene has changed from an aerial shot to a ground-based one. We storyboard so that this kind of shift doesn't happen, but directors are directors.

No work was wasted this time, and the change in point of view might make the shot much easier. So, where does the shot happen?

How big is the lake?

Given that the Calantica map was superimposed over Earth's, I could just do a quick comparison with somewhere on Earth at the same(ish) longitude. Cornwall!! The lake has a maximum span of about 20km.

At an altitude of 1000m, your maximum viewing distance is just over 70km. So if this isn't an aerial shot, it's one taken by a mountain climber. You need some height to capture the distant elements, such as the island city and smoke plumes.

My initial plan was to create a single, giant terrain plate in World Creator. One thing is easier to coordinate than various elements, but there's a problem...

World Creator's sculpt tool has a limit of 1024x1024 resolution, so over the stretch of 65,000m this resolution limit makes the lake far too pixelated and grainy. Time for plan B! I'll build the terrain from plates. Really, for most people, this would have been plan A.

I need to create a sketch of the scene for sign-off. Ideally, today.

T-Shirts

I've been playing with some Orbital Elements t-shirt designs. Last night, I created a silly part-time job-related design.

I know Kung Mop-Fu!

I will do my own Blender t-shirt design for the next one.

Weekend recharge

 I downed tools (for serious work) and enjoyed the weekend by getting out and about. Another rucking session, once again lugging far too much into the city and back.

I have a request from a friend to build a model vehicle inspired by the Kia PV5 WKNDR, an ultra-modern camper van that will no doubt be turned into an explorer for Alien worlds.  The concept sketch work is due next weekend.

Sparrow Films/Raptor, the next shot has changed. It's going to be lower altitude. That makes it a lot easier to stage, but harder to show all the elements in the frame. I need to send the director a sketch for sign-off as soon as possible.

Today I walked into the city without extra weights and came back with new underwear and stuff. 

Tomorrow, I will clean and repaint Leo's bedroom, ready for guests (my sister and her youngest) who are staying next weekend. It's going to be a busy week!

Terrain therapy

Some land forms. Also, a quick scatter test.

Preset grassland materials

Rock and flows

Quick scatter test.

It never rains but it ....snow forecast

 We're heading towards Winter's end, but we might not have seen the last of the ice and snow. In the world of Blender, I got a sudden blast of cold last night, as I realised that my Scene000 needed addon components. I thought it was all node-based and included within the scene. That was the other planet-making solution I used: Cosmo, which was great but has not been maintained by the author and has been removed from Superhivemarket, unless you already bought it.

I'm hoping that we can just absorb the cost of a couple of copies. Hell, I'd buy them myself. However, the director might instead want me to recreate the scene using True SKY3. This is probably achievable, but it's uncertain that it can look as good and finding out might take me a few days of investigation. A bigger investment than the 15 dollars for Geosim...

So my current Raptor project task list:

• Read the latest version of the True SKY 3 Documentation.
• Watch the tutorial videos.
• Do some testing.
• Make a beautiful planet.
  

We will see!

True SKY 3 testing

Minimum

Maximum

Three cloud layers (@ maximum)

Scene 000 Submitted!

 This morning, I shipped the planet scene for Raptor. I can't post finished images, but I can report that I spent about three hours cleaning artefacts from the maps. These mostly appeared in the height map. As a result of my tweaking the colour levels, grid lines from the source images appeared.

Tiny grid lines from satellite source imagery

It feels good to finally submit something! Let's see if changes are required...

Medium Rig progress

Slow progress is still progress. I added a support frame for the fuel tanks. It was too weedy, so I added a stronger-looking one. More on the engine-end of things, tomorrow.

I need to do practice on environment/terrain scenes. That could be something for the weekend. 

It's time for....prod--uct--iv-ity...

 After a weekend of bouncing around inside my own head, I begin the week with more clarity and focus. Let's scoop it all up and put it into this morning's work!

Weekend

I did nearly three hours of "rucking" -- that's walking with a heavy rucksack. I marched forcefully to the city centre and back, swaying occasionally, so I probably looked drunk when hoofing up the steeper hills. It was hard, but it felt good—then. Now, I am still a bit sore. Apparently, I'd packed twice the recommended 10% of my body weight payload -- some 16kg in all. It doesn't seem right to halve the payload for the next session. I'll see how I feel about it next week.

I didn't do much in the creative area. I finished some TV shows: Murderbot (great fun), Season 3 of Slow Horses (silly fun), and some Attack on Titan, with my son, Noah.

Planet "Cobolt"

I'm reasonably happy with the landmass/ocean mask, although there's room for improvement. I've started painting, cloning, and inpainting different biomes and will try to add more dramatic mountain ranges, which I'll need to source large Earth samples from somewhere.  This time, I'll look to make some colour tweaks to make it look a bit different.

This week

For Sparrow/Raptor, I need to deliver the Scene 000 planet scene once I have completed a tidy-up on the planet maps. I then need to sculpt the close-in area of the setting, adding a distinctive arrowhead-shaped lake to make the transition from orbital vp to aerial vp as clear as possible.

Then, apparently, I'm going back to the service road. I think it's all going to need redoing in a mightier and lower-poly mesh.

For personal Project work

Just finish something?!

Shamrayev has chilled to the point where it will take a lot of effort to get it back into production.

The medium rig, which finally received some acceptable progress on Friday. Some of the UVs are typically shonky, although it might not matter, as I'm unlikely to invest the time in learning to do a detailed custom texture using the new Matplus addon.

Scatter tests

It seems like True SKY 3/True-Terrain 5, and Geoscatter now play better together, although I was seeing an apparent bug with one of the scatter modes I use a lot (scatter to a bezier) that didn't seem to work. I need to put together more scenes with more carefully applied scatter systems to ensure everything works when needed.

A first step...floaty-same-tree