Blender School: Nature Generator

Last night, just before going to sleep, I watched a YouTube video about the latest releases of Blender Addons. The first one covered was The Nature Generator, which provides a library of customisable procedural terrains and terrain-related objects -- mostly different rock structures. Oh my! This is what I've been failing to deliver for about three days. It wasn't super-cheap; about £50 for the personal edition, but it looked great. 



I was hesitant due to the high cost and the number of times I've purchased an add-on, only to quickly find a show-stopping deficiency. I watched the release video and read all the comments on SuperHive. Despite any limitations that appear during testing, this looked like a handy landscape toolbox, so I bought it this morning.  If only a couple of the components work well, I'll make use of them and the addon will pay for itself in the long run.

The Nature Generator

Let's jump in and learn the basics before I move on and forget how it works.

Installation

There are two files to download:

Note: The Nature Generator requires Blender 4.1 or later

1. Drag and drop The_Nature_GeneratorX.x zip file into the Blender desktop. The addon will then be installed and appear on the N-panel.

2. The Optional NatureGenerator_Texture_Options.zip file needs to be extracted and placed on your file system, preferably on a local SSD drive, so as not to cause stuttering.

Using The Nature Generator

When installed, you pick from the available assets in the Asset Browser. Once an asset is dropped into the viewport and selected, the N-Panel shows the available parameters. While there are many standard parameters, most assets have some unique properties. Lots of options for customisation!

The Nature Generator is ready to spring into action.

Onwards through work town

 I'm back at the day job, which I can do early while we're not in term time. I was intent on completing the next previs section, but I fell down another rabbit hole.

Quick project

I wanted to conduct a quick animation/post-production test, as I have a bunch of tools in this area that I'm unfamiliar with.

I'm happy with the post-work, but the horizon is too abrupt.

Added landscape meshes to fill out the background.

I had some difficulties with getting the scene to move forward, so I decided to restart and use a True Terrain landscape instead of a flat plain. Expensive!!

The overall vibe of the scene is better, but it needs a lot of work.

The cloud colour is a bit distracting, but I like how the rolling fog softens the horizon.

It's fun, but I really need to do better on the rocks and the scatter. I didn't want to use photogrammetry assets, such as Megascans; instead, I wanted to create my own rocks using RockIt V2. The real test will be completing a 360-degree animation that slowly turns around the globe.

Work was a thing...

 I'm now back at work, but off on Monday -- bless you Bank Holiday. In the meantime, I've reworked the first service road previs.

The rocks are still a mess, but this is about placement, so that the characters are not animated to walk through rocks. I'm still concerned that it might be better to have the production version in play rather than trying to "build up" this previs version.

Better scatters coming soon.

Terrains

I had a quick play with the latest versions of True Terrain and World Creator..

I tinkered more with True-VFX's new asset browser. Pretty cool!

Yikes!

 I've been rambling along the tail-end of Summer in a state of ignorant bliss. On Monday, the penny dropped: I'm back at work on Thursday (tomorrow). It's an odd time to return to work. I guess we'll be using the days before the teaching staff return to do deep cleaning or disruptive work.

Yesterday

I missed making a post because it all got jolly busy. I got feedback on the project work. I need to make some tweaks, which I'll have completed for end of tomorrow.

I progressed the Texas Tower 4 model.

Texas Tower awaits the final elements. Mostly the radar dishes on the back face.

True-VFX

The True-VFX team released a cool new utility, which I had the opportunity to test. It works well!

Updates

True Terrain 5.1.2 arrived, delivering several bug fixes and official Blender 4.5 support.

Photographer 5.6.1 returned, after being pulled by its creator because of some serious compatibility issues with scenes created with earlier versions. The add-on now does a conversion step.

To-do list:

* More work on the previs terrains (priority)
* Complete tutorials for Photographer and Render Raw. These tools look to be stepping on each other's toes with crossover/super-imposed parameters. I still haven't reached the bottom of the over-exposure issue on start-up. 
* Texas Tower 4 work. Complete the deck crane, do some tidy-up, then textures.

Timeout

 I've had a couple of days where I didn't get much done. I played with World Creator and found myself going through the old flow of sculpting a terrain, exporting maps and playing with them in Blender. Not very useful or productive, it's a therapy thing.

The colour map is "banded". Commented as a bug

Today, I found what appears to be a serious bug in the latest World Creator beta that corrupts exported material maps. As good a reason as any to go away and do something more productive. I'm supposed to be doing a final clean-up on the service road, but I wanted a weekend break.

Dark Tower

Last night I watched a YouTube video about the Texas Towers. Built by the U.S. Air Force in the late 1950s, these oil rig-like structures provided extended radar coverage of America's eastern seaboard. The final tower (Tower-4) was notorious because it was sunk in a storm, dooming its crew to a watery grave.

Texas Tower

The story touched a nerve. I love these structures, so I decided to create a quick model. Time limited to be completed tomorrow.

Work-in-progress

More project work progress

 I spent most of today tweaking the previs terrain for the service road. It's now reasonably close to the ARMA 3 storyboard. Matching a 3d model up with the output of a game engine is a weird way to do this. Artistically constraining for questionable reasons, but a great exercise in the technical side of environmental design. Is this close enough? We'll see!

Stand-in character placement

I created each canyon wall with a cube that I extruded along the undulating path. I then stripped away all the geometry except for the inward faces, which then served as a geo-scatter target for various test assets. I ended up with a chunky piece of wall that I created using Rockify.

Manual placement to (mostly) match the storyboard

Lens sim FTW

Bushes

Overview of the key area

Character placement might be tricky with the current small boulder implementation. Looks quite nice, but I might need to push them back into the wall to avoid limiting the animators.

Downing tools for now

Terrain project work

 I recreated a section of the terrain used in the film project. Alas, it wasn't close enough to the reference model, so I'm rebuilding using a more precise one.

 

Nice shape, shame it doesn't match the director's requirements.

Arma3 game area reference

 

Routed mapped directly from the ARMA 3 reference

World Creator sculpt

Floor section

Next, I'll build proxy cliff wall assets, then rocks and trees.

For the cliff assets, I have been experimenting with both Rockify and Rock it V2. 

Back from our summer holiday

 We have returned from our week in Brittany. What a lovely place! So less commercialised than  Cornwall, with which it shares a vibe and some Celtic heritage. 

I took a few photos of beach rocks. Hopefully, I'll get some half-decent rock texture maps out of them eventually.

First bash!

I'll get back to Blender tomorrow. Today we'll finish off our washing chores.

Things I want to do:

• Complete tutorials for some of the new tools I picked up recently. There are a few, and if I don't learn how to use them soon, I will forget I have them and never use them.
• Complete the previs terrain elements for the film project.
• Build a big spaceship.
• Complete a big terrain scene to help cement the lessons learned from my recent environmental art training course.