Gunship

 Dragging myself kicking and screaming into the existing mesh. There are messy bits, and I've repeatedly started the panels, but I will complete and eventually deliver.

A tip for Star Wars ship panelling: big, chunky plates with small insets to break up some long edges.

Fluent 4: Power Trip

 Big drop yesterday. Rudy Michau, creator of the hard surface modelling addon "Fluent", has just released version 4. I installed it and had a very quick peek. Very nice!

A minor peeve, one that is all too common in the addon community: don't release a major new version of your product without a minimal level of documentation. How about some basic release notes? Five bullet points? (EDIT: So this is located on the Discord group. Fair!) There is a nice release video. It does the announcement part of the release quite well, but I will miss essential changes, misunderstand functionality, and get frustrated. This annoyance may be because I'm not using Fluent regularly enough. It's a fantastic tool that gives you super shortcuts to powerful hard surface modelling, but I get into trouble all the time, so I end up corrupting my models and then struggle to clean up the problems. Hard Ops is more powerful, but it's a somewhat overwhelming set of tools that requires a lot more training investment (which I have made through a training course).

Cha..cha..cha...changes

Documentation 


This really is a "power move". Fluent gave you the tools to create folded cylinder forms, but I found them all but unusable because the Boolean cuts on a circular array had the most fiddly and counterintuitive controls. 

Busy with a small creative fugue

 We've had a run of busy days. Now I have a part-time job, so I'm juggling time for Blender. I still have a lot of available time, but it turns out that the things I was doing between Blender sessions now cut into my old Blender time. Plus, I'm more tired and therefore a bit sapped of creative energy.

I made what I thought was a good-ish start of the Star Wars ship, but I found myself looking at the base mesh I'd created as if it were already compromised. Too crude! I'm not sure. We had visitors last weekend, and Leo's birthday and Noah's Anime convention this weekend. Time to recommit to Blender efforts!

Always, always time for some terrain work...

I'm a bit addicted to setting up a new terrain. Once I have a basis for doing lots of hard and slow work, I tend to walk away and start yet another one. I need to complete a big project. It's actually been a couple of months since I had something meaty and worthwhile on the go.

Quick creation to show how to do sunset in cloud shots.

This is a nice start to a moorland scene...

Next: Get the gunship built!

Blender School: Panels

 If you do science fiction-themed hard surface modelling, then modelling panels is going to be something you do a lot. 

 Blender Guppy Addons

Install as a drag-and-drop extension.
When installed a new option appeared on the right-click context menu.

Panel Cutter

While Random Flow makes creating lots of panelling very easy, its effect is mostly driven by randomisation. In contrast, Panel Cutter requires you to manually place panel edges, either by selecting edges or marking edges as sharp or as seams. 

1. Select edges.
2. (Optional) Mark sharp or seam. Sharp can be applied using Geo(Nodes).
3. Right-click menu and select Panel Cut.

The Panel Cut menu appears.

Type: How panels are cut, using a bevel, an inset or via Nodes (new)
Limit:  Select (selected edge), Sharp (marked sharp edges), Seam (marked seam edges)

Width: The width of the edge
Depth: Depth of the edge
Segments: Segmentation of the edge.
Split: Split the results
Merge: Merge the results

Cut Symmetry: TBD
Border Sharp: Make edge border sharp
Boundary Edges: TBD
Floater Mesh: Leave the effect as a separate "floating" mesh

Middle Sharp:  TBD

Tutorial for the latest version:

Gunship: first steps

Easter Sunday.

We have family visiting, and Clara is sleeping off a night shift, so I'll be out all day. 

Gunship progress...not much

Into the panels too soon. 

A first run at the panelling. I started too soon. I should have been working on a second level of detail that changes how lines flow on the base model. Panelling and greebles can break up straight lines, but it's better to have more complexity in the blocked-out mesh.

I'm going to experiment with the underlying model and restart the panelling. The mesh's topology has a lot of tapering, which means that any panelling that you pull out of the mesh will flow at angles. It results in panels and blocks that are all angled, when it would be better to have them rectangular or with straight lines.

Planning for another Blender Market (Superhive) product

 It's going to be a small-scale Star Wars-themed ship: a Correlian Gunship, a hyperspace-capable, heavily armoured escort ship that would protect bulk transporters from pirates.

GS-94 Osprey - Light Escort Gunship


Key design elements:

Quad turret arrangement and a look that tells you this thing can take some punishment. So, I'm moving away from the sleeker, speedier-looking designs. As a defender, this doesn't need speed as it will stay close to the ship it protects. I'll include a few Millennium Falcon visual cues. I may recreate the Falcon's guns and hull plate styling. Although I won't dangle the design too close to Disney IP, as I'd like to avoid any Imperial entanglements... 😆

Leading contender

Sleeker...maybe

Space tank. Earlier design.

Next Step. A more refined illustration.

Always be landscaping!

I intend to add bonus terrains and a tutorial video to my terrain pack. This is a contender.

Stability still a problem with True Terrain 5.1

 I'm still having crashes "in view port", whereas most crashes I experience on my old machine happen in the first moments of a render. This is very annoying.

Updates

Just as Blender crashed, I noticed an update was available. This is why I like running Blender through Steam. I can always run earlier versions if I have to, using Blenderbase, but it's nice for updates to come immediately and seamlessly.

Also, there is a new version of True Terrain 5.1. It may only contain some tiny changes, unlikely to resolve the stability issues, which could be caused by the system, not the software (that idea makes me glum).

Working with big terrains is not impossible; it's just annoying.

Back to work, back to Blender productivity

Today

Back to the job. Looking forward to it, at least a bit. 

This week

I really need to get a new product into Blender Market (now called Superhive). From the top of my head:

• Traveller ships, suitable for 3d printing...
• A Star Wars style ship
• A collection of photogrammetry assets
• Simple and very cheap scene assets (science fiction or real-life objects?)
• A rigged robot
• More Orbital Elements stuff (or finishing off the stuff I already made)

Blender Training:

• Complete the CG Cookie training courses
• Hard Ops course
• Relearn Character Creator
• Practice some of the forgotten core add-ons (PBR Extreme, for example)

Instability

I had a series of consistent crashes with True-Terrain 5. I raised a bug. 

It seemed to be associated with a particular height map. I've had crashes on other scenes, but not consistently and less often.

A nice start. Some artefacts on the tree cards. Needs more transparency layers, I guess.

More TT5 testing. Okay, here!

Doodle scene. Sanctus materials.

Back from Wales

 We're back. It was great and terrible. Wales is a spiritual place, beautiful and less spoilt. The tree house was amazing, warm and comfy, yet it gave you that sense of a simpler life. Leo broke his arm on the tree house rope swing. He spent two nights in the not-so-nearby hospital. Clara and I each spent a night with him.

Back to Blender. Next week, back to work

Fluent. Some struggling going on with the tool.

Giant Hexiworld

Work-in-progress Beanstalk train

Break time

 We're off to Wales to live in a tree house for a few days. Expect a dip in Blender output. When I get back, I'll no doubt be full of Blender beans, ready to build stuff from my piles of sketches that I'll be doing while I'm mostly disconnected.

Path scene - early stage

Recent terrain sculpts were made in World Creator. I'm going to add a bonus back to my terrain pack on Blender Market (which changes its name, tomorrow).

Playing around with the earlier bridge scene. 

A Monorail element of the beanstalk. Planning stage.

In the Easter break

 I took my boys on a day trip to Lincoln on Tuesday. Yesterday, we had a lazy day. I've been in a creative funk. It's more a lack of focus and drive. I start things, feel bad about them, then go away and start something else. It's bad news for productivity. Get a strong plan. Make a strong start. Then, when you fall down, you get up and carry on instead of going home.

Sketchin 

Although I've lacked a strong plan, I've had some creative time with terrain sketching. 

A common fault I see and have often done myself is compressing a landscape scene so that flat lands, foothills, and snow-topped mountains are all in the same one or two-kilometre stretch. While creatively, this will give you maximum bang for your terrain mesh bucks, it isn't very realistic.

The benefits of stretching out your scene's view distance:

• Those distant mountains can benefit from smaller mesh density.
• Atmospherics require fewer creative tweaks as you're sticking closer to real-world scales.
• You get more sky. Make your sky a co-star of your scene, not a bit-player!
• It's easier to get a more epic feel with wider viewing angles.

Some disadvantages:

•  It's harder to create a scene where you are close to the subject. You can do this by staging a foreground plate directly in front of the camera. Dense scatters and a more intimate subject can all happen there.
• This approach doesn't work for every situation. If you're going for a more telephoto-style scene where the background and foreground squeeze together, you may have to deal with more dead space. 
•  Wide angles mean less scope for camera culling. Either the scenes use more resources, or you might need to reduce things to stay within your system's rendering budget.

Installed and configured the full version of True-Terrain 5.1