Quiet day / Housekeeping day

 

There was not much productive work today. I did some housekeeping, so to speak. I tested some Quixel assets. They're going to be temporarily free as they move from Unreal-centric to an agnostic 3D/game asset store.  They have some incredible models, but the results in Blender often look very wrong. I need to look at how the materials are being set up, I think the projection might be wrong on the normal maps.

Quixel 3D asset. Icelandic plain

In addition to the 3D models, I also bagged some materials. Mostly rocky and sanding grounds. Here are some of them imported into my True-Terrain library.

Luna version.... I've been trying this a lot.

This is another quick run at a moon landscape. Little rocks add a lot, but a lot of refinement is still required.

Rigging burnout

 I'm taking a break from failing at rigging. I could feel my confidence and enthusiasm melt whenever my attempt to build a simple rig ended messily. I've got something fundamentally wrong and baked it into my practice without realising it.

I need to start from scratch with a fresh head, make more notes, and do more troubleshooting and error searches to get to the bottom of the problem. It could also be that my rig requirements are quirky and actually more difficult than they look.

I'll return to the container vessel soon.

I played with True-Terrain 5. It's a lot of fun, but I still need to learn how to use it properly. I started to think about writing a guide—initially to build my understanding, but maybe it could be something I could share or even become commercial. First, I'd need to write and polish a chapter or two.

Terrain! 

Base scene

Two step forward, then your feet detatch from your legs and move above your head...

 Did I tell you that I'm struggling with rigging? I'm still struggling. I realize how important it is to be in the right mode for rigging. Some of my woes are down to accidentally creating new armatures or doing edits in the wrong mode.

Simpler requirements, but it's still beyond me.

A further set of complications has come to light: bone rotation! It is not aligned to world space, and some transformations are done incorrectly. I come out of pose mode and find my parented objects suddenly arranged randomly. The previously parented key element has its origin at some random location now. Bones need to have appropriate rotation. If they are twisted incorrectly within the rig, then your rig's movements will be wonky at best.

Stability release! Blender 4.2.2 has been released.

Nothing new. It's just fixes for edge-case crashes and some minor functional bugs.

https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-2/

4.2.2

Pumped!

 This morning, I completed a couple of hours of animation training using a Udemy course. It's very good! It's easy to follow and pitched at the right level for me. Sadly, it's already run through the elements that I needed training on. The next six hours are about character rigging rather than rigid bodies. I'll complete the course, but not as a matter of urgency.

I did get a better understanding of some of the foundational animation, amature, parenting, and bone systems, which was helpful to build upon. So, what to do about my rigging woes? I went back to the YouTube videos and rewatched them, and it really helped. I got stuck, and things went wrong, but I went back to the very first video I watched—just one minute long—and I managed to replicate it. It's proof that I'll get what I need eventually.

A pump-type thing with a rigged piston.

A couple of flaws:

The piston rod and leave are not perfectly aligned. You can't see it here, but on the other side of the pump you can see them becoming superimposed. You must use the Shift+S tools that move an object's origin or 3D cursor.

The bone constraint "Limit rotation" wasn't quite working correctly. Pulling or pushing the pump too far separates the rod from the sleeve or pushes the rod impossibly deep so that it goes through the sleeve's pivot. Using the Limit Rotation constraint stops the bone from moving through an impossible axis, such as sideways instead of along the lever's arc. It should also let you set a maximum and minimum allowed angle of rotation to stop things from breaking. It just wasn't working for me. I must not have been reading the angle correctly.

Things I learned today:

When creating bones to use in an amature, duplicate them from existing bones. If you use Add>Armature>Single Bone, the resulting bone is part of a new amature, and you won't be able to parent it with an offset. I saw several commons on various rigging videos where viewers had experienced the same confusion.

Flipping between the modes can be a source of confusion if you slip into the wrong mode:

Object Mode: Move objects, no interaction with a bone's elements.

Edit Mode: Move bones and bone elements. For example, change the size of the bone. In fact, all you can do is add more bones, which will be added at the 3D cursor.

Pose Mode: Move bones within an armature, such as when posing a rig. 

To modify a bone or Parent a mesh to a bone, ensure you're in the edit mode.
To move a bone's position in a rig, ensure you're in pose mode.

Rigging and bone problems and new flares

Unhinged!

New hinge system ready to be rigged.

 I finally threw myself into the Blender rigging. I was firing on all cylinders, raring to go, but I repeatedly bounced off the wall. This stuff is hard, or I'm really stupid. Wait! I know I'm stupid, but both cases could be simultaneously true. You can see why this is making me glum.

The problem: Rigging uses several interconnected systems, all entirely new for me. This is animation, of which I know almost nothing. This type of animation uses an armature system, like an old-fashioned puppet's wood-pins-and-string skeleton. I don't know anything about armatures. Except, they're made out of bones. Bones define where movement happens, what constraints are placed on the movement, and what effect movement has on the overlayed mesh. Bones seem hard. There are many hidden rules about how all these systems relate and interact.

Like so many problems, this one started with YouTube—lots of YouTube! I've watched about six videos on rigging rigid-body systems, like pistons and hinges, but it hasn't sunk in.

So what next? Training—proper Training! It just so happens there's a good Udemy Blender animation course on sale. So, I enrolled and will gradually work through 8 hours of knowledge.

This has been dispiriting, but it reminds me of the first few hours of using Blender. Crushing ignorance weighs you down, but if you are patient, you slowly make your way up the wall. Tomorrow, I will climb that wall!

Why do I need this knowledge? It's that hinge system! I rebuilt it so that it straddles the support rings instead of working only off one ring. Well, it made sense at the time, although I'm still not sure that if I rig this system up, it will actually work as expected.

FLARED!!!

I bought an add-on for lens flares (Flared XT). Seriously, you can't go into space without beautiful blooms and flare artefacts. This one works well, although it also works surprisingly weirdly. You'd think the addon did some kind of post-production magic through the compositor, but oh no. It generates in-scene transparencies, which create the effect directly through the render engine (Cycles or EeVee).

Bloom transparencies in the viewport and the output result

One limitation of this technique is that you must greatly increase the number of transparency layers supported in Cycles. I think I had to go up to 200. Eevee is unaffected as it supports unlimited transparency layers.

Flare!

Ring of flare!

Anton done (enough) and something new...

 I got the support ship completed sufficiently. It only needs to be docked with the Bayern for a poster image.

I'd polish a bit more if I intended to animate, but this is enough for now.

ISV-5 Anton Dohrn

Anton Docked with Bayern.

I had some right pain with this. I'd lost my fuel ball rebuild, so I had to do it again. I have floating model parts that disconnect from their actual location. This is sometimes caused by a displacement that moves the mesh during rendering, but I couldn't see where it was applied or why.

Something different.

I bought a new product, Character Creator 4. It creates 3D characters for animation. I want better characters in my scene, and this seems like a good start. Although the range of available characters is large, they are super-expensive, so I might end up sticking with the default characters.

Susan!

This is a good start! Installed Character Creator 4. Installed an auto-setup plugin and a Blender workflow plugin. Loaded one of the default characters into CC4. Clicked on the Load into Blender button -- Boom! Blender opens and the character is loaded in, all ready to render.

Susan watches  the True-Sky sun

Pretty good quality

I need more clothes. 

Bayern Support Ship

 Today, I started on the final element of the Bayern Project: one of the two survey ships that form the Bayern's small flotilla.

Anton!

Roughly blocked out thrusters

Mid-level detailing mostly complete

I may have it completed tomorrow, unless I decide to shift onto something else.

Mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container (test animation)

Shiny! Also enormously expensive in terms of poly count

 Yesterday's efforts included rough material selection. There are still no decals, though. I did some more clean-up and rebuilt the fuel bladder.  



I created a test animation during my lunch break. Then, another longer animation was rendered last night.

Animation frame.

Moving modules to a second support/spin ring could have made a cleaner hinge system that works off the opposite ring instead of at the module's own root. I might do a rebuild, but if I do, it will be done after the module lander.

Mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container - What next..

 I made some good progress. Some changes here and there.

I now need to focus on getting the build finished. There will need to be some additional touches. I will rebuild the fuel bladder and add communication equipment and external stores. Suddenly, the container's panels look sparse, but I prefer them that way for now.

Space lighting

The containers are now orientated so that the floors align with the cradle when folded for spin. Nice. The cradle structure on the outer-facing walls looks awfully cluttered, but I can live with it. It might look good with the proper lighting and staging.

Clutter-bug: Folded down for spin

Folded-out for acceleration-as-gravity

Mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container - Test Run

 It's Tuesday morning. Rather than pushing on with the build, I needed to jump ahead to test that the fully populated container frame doesn't look too cluttered.

Spin ring reversed

Testing out the reversed direction of the ring. So it doesn't look like this fixes the issue in that folding downwards puts the container's floor where the roof would need to go. This might be a time when cool-looking wins out against realistic. To be decided.

So I had a thought: Instead of doubling up the containers on the ring, how about a second ring where the containers are offset so all the containers can fold in together?

I like it!

I really like it, but it might look horribly cluttered when viewed from other directions.

Folded down for spinning.

Firstly, the hinge system didn't work as I hoped. When folded down, the hinge isn't locked in a properly load-bearing position. It does fold in, but not as expected. This might not matter, as it's all lost in the complicated latticework.

It does look a bit cluttered, but not so much that extra padding cannot remedy it. To this end, I thought that I'd add fuel bladders. That's bags instead of solid tanks at the midsection. These quickly modelled cloth bags must have had a massive polycount, as the render took minutes instead of seconds. I think this is working.

This was a quickly hashed test setup. Before continuing with this configuration, I'll return to the previous file version for fixes, refinements, and build optimization.

Mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container (Round Two!)

 The mini-project continues. I'm reasonably happy with the progress. The idea that this would be a super-quality build has fallen aside. I'm having a horrendous time with Fluent. It may be a bug, a scene corruption, or my keyboard or mouse has been sticking. I managed to get what I needed, though.

Understated Pod

I wanted the container pod to avoid excessive sculpting and boolean cuts, which are too easy to make but hard to justify. This is actually two of the units I built stuck together to get the dimensions close to the stand-in module.

Nonetheless, the hinge system needed to be rebuilt to better match the new form.

Longer and with a bigger cage

Interesting story here. The pivot is in the wrong direction. I hadn't noticed when I first blocked it out, but under spin, the roof would become the floor. Not ideal, but not a show-stopper. The fix might be as easy as having the pods pivot forward instead of towards the rear. Then, the pod's deck floor would be on the outer side.

Progress made:

• Command module with a first round of details, including windows.
  
• Two containers are attached directly to the hull. These don't spin and are probably used for stores. They mate with the hull via an airlock block at the rear. This is the bit that caused me so much woe.
• Note that the structural ring has a bunch of boolean cuts to show that it is a structural frame and doesn't contain any bits.

Tomorrow: Finish the primary build steps. Clean up. Some materials, some lamps. Then...Drum Roll... I will bone and rig the hinge machinery to animate the modules folding down. I watched a tutorial, and it looks complicated but this is me laughing at my comfort zone as I side down the rockface. 

A new mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container

 It's time to build another space vehicle, this time one of my own designs. I'm also looking to make it available for sale, which is forcing me to be more careful in the build process. Every time I try to ignore some lousy meshwork, I see some future customers looking at duplicated verts or shader artefacts and then raising complaints.

This extra level of care might be eroded over time. We will see.

The idea:

The concept

Containers that pivot on their support ring

This heavy rig travels at 1g to its destination. During the journey, it accelerates forward, creating simulated gravity. The container units pivot on their support ring so that their decks are oriented appropriately. Once at the destination, the engines turn off, and the vehicle sits in an orbit. The containers then pivot ninety degrees so that gravity can be simulated by spinning the rig on its forward-rear axis. This model was built in July 2023. I liked the concept but not the execution of some elements. Particularly those Space 1999 Eagle-like Drone module trucks. So it's time for some new and improved!

Blocking out

Do the fiddly stuff First. In this case, the container hinge system.

Happy enough with this as a starting point.

Checking out what it looks like with more containers. I might fit another six on the ring...

Time for a break. I want to do a good job of the container module. That will be a project in itself.

Blender School: Fluent Power Tools

 I lapsed on my HardOps training course. It got unstable and when Blender crashes a lot I have to go and do something else or I completely lose my enthusiasm for the tool.

There is another option. A mini-HardOps from developers cgthroughts called Fluent/Fluent Power Tools, if you get a library of extra functions. It's brilliant, but like with HardOps, you need a minimal command of hard surface modelling best practices, or you get "acute bevels", where meshes get artefacts and become corrupted.

It's a tool that you can start using right away, and produce some really powerful effects in a few clicks, but you need to delve a little deeper to get the full power of the tool. I could never work out how to duplicate boolean cutters, but it turns out that they were not implemented effectively, until recently. CG Seb, explains here:

So, this post is a quick refresher and update on my fluent knowledge.

Duplicating Booleans

First, create a Fluent object. Then, create a boolean cut. Select the cutter.

From the Fluent menu, Select the Boolean button (White box with a blue cross).

A duplicate boolean appears. Move it. Place it anywhere with a left click. When finished, right-click away from the target.

Duplicated Boolean Cutter! Amaze! Amaze!

Also...

1. Duplicate associated artefacts such as cloth meshes or slices by Parenting them to the Boolean cutter before duplicating them.

2. Duplicated booleans can be sent updates from the originating cutter by using the Boolean Synchronisation tool:

On to the next thing, and back...

 Having rested on my laurels for several days, it's time to report in.

The animation was incredibly well received by the 2300AD community. It has inspired me to do more in that brilliant universe. But right now, I want to get some Orbital Elements stuff done. To that end, the first effort will be a brief animation of a Luna facility. It combines space and terrains: Love Squared!

Crash land

I created some more Luna terrains in World Creator. I even set one off on a 3-second animation while grocery shopping. It crashed out before completing. Because it was just a quick test, I'd set it to chug out an animation file rather than individual frames, so I have no idea how far it got before crashing to the desktop.

Less ledges, more crater

Lovely ledges

Testing out for scale

If I use this terrain, I need to decide on the size of the facility and how big the terrain will be. This looks about right. However, it does mean that the terrain is too small to establish the surroundings. It might be a bit tight. The animation could be a camera crane's upward motion. Something simple.

And back

I need to complete a companion starship for the Bayern Project. It won't take long, and it would be better to get the promised poster done quickly, which is held up because I need this extra ship to complete it.

Animation!

 The animation is completed! I used Capcut to encode it, but that was a rather unpleasant experience. It's an excellent free tool, but it doesn't look optimal for traditional frame-based animation.

I shared the video in a few places and got resoundingly positive feedback. Hurrah! That's nice.

I'll return to build the sister ship, which can dock under the front of the Bayern. 

Luna Land

In the afternoon, I started playing with World Creator. I want to do a terrain-based animation next. A lunar facility, I think.

No rest for the wicked: Animation prep

 The thoughts of animating the Bayern both excited and scared me. This morning, I tried to line up the spin habitats for setting a cyclic animation, essentially wheels that spin for the entire duration of an animation. Well, it turns out that having an object made up of a hundred different bits isn't going to work too well. Everything needs to be parented, and once you have that many parent associations the viewport gets laggy.

The brute force solution was to massively consolidate the ship. Make those piles of 100 meshes into single meshes. Then you are only animating a big complex mesh, not a hundred separate ones, which sometimes float off in the wrong direction.

Hours it took!

Rebuilt for animation.

I broke things numerous times, but it worked out in the end.

Viewport

Back to True-Terrain 5

Good old-fashioned 3d terrains. This work is very prone to crashing compared with ship modelling. This is an alpha, and most crashes are caused by the lack of guard rails against spinning up parameters so that you instantly exhaust available memory, etc.

Using the Simulation approach rather than frames makes the new water less broken.