Back to work ..on the service road.

 I have some outstanding revision work to complete on the previs service road elements. There's not a huge amount to do in principle, but I suspect that I will encounter some snags.

The biggest question mark is how successfully I can resculpt the ambush section's underlying terrain to take out a big kink that currently offers the characters a hide that they should have.

Here are the changes, in brief:

1. A hidden entrance

The tunnel entrance should be obscured so it startles the characters as they follow the road. The layout currently doesn't support this dramatic moment.

To do: resculpt and or redress the scatters so that the entrance isn't visible until you pass the area (in red). Also, replace the proxy trees and bushes with actual tree/bush objects.

2. Nowhere to hide

Current previs version

Storyboard version showing how this section of road should look.

The ambush section bends and provides outcroppings that would give the characters a prominent place to rush to gain cover from the incoming sniper fire. That kink needs to be removed so that the characters must hide among the small boulders in their area.

This task looks like the most work, but if I just do a big cutout of the underlying terrain and use scatters to handle the cliff itself, it may not be much work.

3. A better rock

The rally points critical rock formation doesn't provide the cover that is intended for the scene. I need to make adjustments. Shouldn't be too hard, except I really don't like these scatter objects any more. I got a bit unspooled trying to rebuild the scatters rather than just resculpting the rock. Well have another go!

Blender School: True Sky 3 (Part 1)

True Sky 2.x was arguably the best Blender addon for creating your own skies. It didn't give you the high detail or complexity of a well-chosen HDRI, but it could generate an animation-ready living sky with a full day/night cycle and some cool volumetrics for fog and atmospherics.

It was fast and flexible, but it lacked a few things, such as more complex multi-layered clouds or a robust way to export an HDRI from its output. From today, those limitations are gone. As its strapline claims, the sky is no longer the limit.

True Sky 3

A quick tour of True-VFX's new addon.

5's alive!

 Yesterday's Internet issues looked like they would scupper all the releases. In the end, everything got released.

Blender 5.0 is now officially released, and I got it installed and braved bringing in 4.5 settings, saving me a considerable amount of time - providing it didn't break Blender. There were a couple of addon failures that got instant resolution:

Meshmachin3 tools and True Sky 2.x were both updated within minutes of installing Blender. All sorted. Phew! True Sky 2 didn't get much use because of the release of a brand-new version... see below.

Other addons may cause problems, but these can be tackled as and when they reveal themselves. Worst case: I'll delete and perform a complete fresh installation. 

True Sky 3 

The Internet disruption only slightly delayed the release. I came home late and purchased it in a bit of a rush. I didn't notice that my discount was accepted, but it wasn't applied, so I'm probably the only person to pay full price on day one. Superhive will hopefully resolve the issue. [Edit: They did, just a few hours later]

Early Test: 3 Cloud layers at 600 samples

What's it like?

First impressions. Oh boy! The evident capabilities of this addon are breathtaking. It's not an incremental update on version 2.0 that adds some improvements here and there; what you get is a completely rebuilt system that changes and improves everything.

Some things to hold in mind as the giddy superlatives fill the air: This is early access. There are some rough edges, some missing elements, and, most significantly to me, after a couple of hours, this is not like True Sky 2, where you turn it on and get a lovely base sky. This gives you a lot more control, and right now, it doesn't offer any defaults, so you have to attend to various settings. It's a shame that there isn't a mode that lets you run the addon in "simple mode", where it outputs to the True Sky 2 default setup. Being a from-the-ground-up rewrite, there's no attempt to read True Sky 2 scenes, so any old scenes that contain True Sky will need to be redone. Early access is what it is. Some things might be technically too difficult or impractical to implement, while other things might be added soon.

This is such a big change and complex... It's not complex; it's parameter-rich. There are so many parameters; there are countless ways to change the sky. Some are very direct and obvious, while others are ambiguous or extremely deep in the maths weeds. It's twenty steps forward, put a gentle push off the edge of a cliff.

I should do an episode of Blender School that performs a deep dive. 

Blender 5 Released Today

I may be jumping the gun here, but today is the scheduled day for Blender 5's release. It's a big deal! I have already pointed out that, in the thirteen years I've been using Blender, I've only witnessed versions 3.0 and 4.0. That's a slow climb! I guess the big 3D app players have long dropped traditional version numbering in favour of year-based names, so they can iterate without flying through all the numbers, or having people dwell too long on whether a release is full-fat, or a modest top-up.

Egg House 5

I could have changed and improved twenty things, but I just ran out of time. 

1. Composition and lighting tweaks, although they're not too bad, there is a lot of room for improvement.
2. My added dirt is subtle, which I am happy with, but the dirt maps could have better matched the shape of the egg house. Maybe streak lines coming down from the top and drop stains from some of the ports.
3. Some more clutter around the egg. I rendered with ivy, which looked fun and cool, but also broke up the egg shape a bit too much and wasn't at all plausible. Given that the full render took 5 hours, I only re-rendered the region with the ivy and placed it over a copy of the original render. This is a quick way to do spot fixes on mistakes in a still with a long render time.

Second ivy. The original was too sparse and just distracting.

I'll do another update later today about the status, so if Blender 5.0 isn't released, I'll issue a correction and look like a goober.

Also, there's another celebration. Addon developer True-VFX have its 7th birthday and will be releasing TrueSKY3. I will be having a play with it.

Blender School: Ultimate 3D Environment Animation Course - Blender

It's time to start learning more about 3d Environment design, this time from Cov Phillips.

1. References

Great computer-generated imagery captures qualities from reality, even if you are not striving for photorealism.  You can't store all these details of the world in your head, so it's really important to use references. In most cases, this means reference photos. Use them for modelling, to explore the qualities of materials and patterns, such as the way grass grows or the way rocks scatter.

Cov uses Google Maps to explore the world for visual references. Amazing idea! 

Also Getty Images, the photo site.

Any such site, such as Pinterest or Flickr, will offer a wealth of example images of almost anything out there.

Obligatory plug for PureRef. It seems like everyone recognises how good it is for the way you gather and arrange your reference images.

2. Blocking Out

"You really can't go wrong in this part. Except you can."  

True! When you draw and paint, going wrong usually results in a restart of the work. In 3D, there's no situation where a mistake can't be remedied without throwing your work away. However, this misses something important. Your most precious resource is often time. If you go wrong in a 3D project and need to backtrack, you will typically waste a significant amount of effort.

Start a project by getting the big, simple forms right. There's no point in getting the details if you turn around later and realise it wasn't the correct scale or didn't fit your design.

 Building the house

Cov takes the next few lessons to complete the build of the scene's main point of focus, an old American house.

The house that Cov built

Dreaded return to the dentist

 Just as my mouth is starting to recover, I return for the serious work, which I think is code for an extraction. Bugger. I am treating myself to treats. I'm going to get Arborea Nature Addon, and I just picked up another environmental design course, this time from Cov Phillips, who has shown off some fantastic work on YouTube.

Celebration Crit

I made good progress on the celebration scene. Enough to require a critique

The dramatic depth of field makes for nice framing, except the egg house is a bit lost in the composition. I should cut out some of the top and bottom and get it closer to the rule of thirds.

I may redo the ivy or expand it across the other side of the egg. There needs to be a bit more grime on the egg, and also some more decals to add the look of a space vehicle.

The portal ring needs some breakup. Maybe even some tiny lights or a regular pattern.

Deadline is probably Tuesday, so I'm down to the final polishing.

Celebration rendering progress

Tooth pain has subsided, mostly. Next week I need to get the service road changes completed. For now... 

Celebration Scene

All being well, Blender 5.0 goes into full release by next Tuesday, so just a couple more days left in which to finish my celebration scene. Better get cracking!!

Yesterday I set up an environment scene. I took the brave and weird step of changing the scene's aspect ratio to portrait. It really grates because I love wide landscape views, the constraint is counter to what I most like in landscape scenes. However, it really helps if you want a lot of dense foliage in your scene. 

Starting terrain with a stream running through it

Tall view on the rocks

Egg house added.

Now I was going to complete the construction of the egg house before importing it into the terrain, but time is running out. I can't afford to be too fussy. I won't be massively expanding the model. I want a water pipe and some surrounding scatter. I am experimenting with the idea of using cloth physics for an awning. 

But who lives in the egg? It's Leo!

What next?

• A background layer with some hills and more trees. 
• More trees and bushes
• Tidy up / thin out the foreground rocks
• Add some small plants/bushes/flowers.
• Add a Blender 5.0 label or motif.  I might do an embossed Blender logo on the egg shell?
• Polish and refine

Contribute!

 

Silver!

This morning, I'm fighting pain and lack of sleep. It's down to a partly completed root canal surgery, which has left me with the prospect of either a tooth extraction next week, or some kind of special hand-wave procedure that sounds like Scotty from Star Trek thinking up some technobabble solution to avoid antimatter annihilation. 

In this weakened and emotional state, I completed the 2025 Blender Survey, which prompted me to reflect on my lack of contribution over the past few years. I stopped my subscription years ago, as part of an urgent cost-saving measure. I later excused not restarting payments because I wasn't doing as much Blender work. Later, when Blender became my "main thing", I felt that I was spending a lot of money on Blender Addons, which adds a small contribution with each purchase. I decided that I could afford £10 per month in addition to all the SuperHive store purchases. That makes me feel better. Maybe this excruciating pain was really the build-up of guilt for not contributing? *Side of my face still throbs with pain* Nope, it really is a swollen gum. 

Go on, give them some money!

Release Candidate

Blender 5.0 Release Candidate snuck out in the dead of night. I installed it on my secondary machine, but I will hold off installing it on my main machine. A major release means a fresh installation and the case-by-case reinstallation of addons. It's potentially troublesome, and while I thought I'd be able to do it over this "candidate week", some addons will still need updates and probably won't appear until after 5.0 enters general availability, next week. I will do some play testing, but I'm not going to risk falling into a can of horrible software worms in my current state.

Well, hello there!

Well, Character Creator 4 still works, though it's installed on my secondary machine.

Cthulhu cubes -- generative AI assets.

Egg house progress. I have 1 week until the celebration scene needs to be finished.

Will we see a new candidate?

 It's the proposed date of the Blender 5.0 release candidate. Will we see it today? I've noticed that another patch is due for the 4.5 LTS version, with a release candidate for 4.5.5 already in testing. Does that impact the 5.0 release? We will know later today.

Yesterday's tooth pain had to running to my therapy space: terrain sculpting and rendering.

Dentist = Ouch

 This morning's dental surgery has left me in some considerable pain. My ability to output anything worthwhile is being curtailed. 

Luckily I did some more cool things on Monday.


Egg House progress

The weird egg-happed lifepod-turned-emergency-shelter thing is progressing. I started to play with materials as I thought about what else it needs.

All the materials are from the Sanctus Library, which remains a brilliant resource, but you may need to go deeper for true "hero" materials. The outer shell should be really realistic, with additional layers of grime and some graffiti. To be developed further! I should get the interior modelling done first. 

I also want the egg to be dressed with cables and rough, crafted elements, such as an awning and a washing line. This pod appears to have floated down from the sky and been stuck here for years, gathering moss and becoming the centre of a primitive habitation.

Typical weekend

 Was it a lazy weekend? Well, I didn't do very much. Battlefield 6 was offering double-XP, so it made sense to mindlessly waste all my time on that. But not all my time, really. I actually did some cool things.

I did a lot of scatter practice, as I want to do a really good job on the Blender 5.0 celebration render.

New terrain. Lots and lots of new terrains

Tres dark out there.  It's hard to see the biome test.

I played with GeoScatter's biome system. Biomes are a collection of ground scatter recipes that carefully layer different ground assets to produce an instant environment type. They are too resource-hungry to use on anything other than a tiny area of foreground. 

Biomes in a pot

From now on, I'll use this smallish pot (it's enormous, for a pot, but very small as a terrain) to test complex scatter collections and own-grown biomes.

A dry grass terrain (my own scatter collection)

Arid (Bagapie biome collection)

Customised biome

Customised biome

Another terrain and some of those wonky generative AI assets

This element looks pretty cool. I will generate some complementary elements to form a full Lovecraftian alien temple.

This week

Blender 5.0 Release Candidate

This will set the clock for the full release in the following week, unless something stinky turns up while testing. I will migrate some of my own work to 5.0, although project work, such as the Service Road, must remain on 4.5 LTS.

True Sky 3

Oh boy, this looks absolutely amazing, especially with the added sky physics and support for planets.

Layered clouds and a "projected planetary sphere"

Service Road

Complete the requested changes to the service road elements. Probably a day's work all in all.

Celebration Render

Complete the modelling and texturing of the egg house. Select a terrain and start dressing it. I had trouble testing BagaRiver addon. I might look into it as it looks like a great way to add a nice stream. This might be handled by Nature Generator; I'll consider that, too.

Service Road Updates

 Last night, I had a meeting with Andrew, the director of the animation project. He had a list of alternations that I need to do on the submitted service road scenes. It's mostly fine detail stuff where the scene doesn't quite work with the character staging. There's only one significant change, where the "sniper alley" section of the road needs to be straightened to deny characters any obvious and easy places to hide along the valley walls. It's not so big that it requires a complete rebuild, although I will do a rebuild of the scatter systems so they're consistent between sections.

That will be next week's work. 

Weekend

I will be playing around with the Blender 5.0 celebration scene and probably wasting time on "terrain therapy".

Issues of the worrying kind

I've had two recent incidents where my PC's display went black. This issue was reported early on in the release of the 50-series GPU card. I thought it was fixed, but it may be back, unless this is something different.

Next week

Blender 5.0 Release Candidate

I'll start testing it, although project work may continue in 4.5.3 for a white. Full release will be the week after. 

True Sky 3.0 should be released. It looks like an amazing upgrade. Space, planets, rings, multiple cloud layers. So excited!

Supposed to be grassy. Turned out Lovecraftian

Release day

I placed a hex on today's release by talking about Blender 5.0 in yesterday's post. The foundation just pushed the release back a week, so the release candidate is now due on the 12th and the full release is now due on the 18th of November. Oh hum! These things happen. I suppose the remaining bugs and issues appear too serious to be resolved with a few quick updates over a few days.

I'm still working towards a release celebration render.

Work-in-progress:

Test shot

A render to celebrate the release of Blender 5.0

 A major release (x.x to y.0) for Blender is a big deal!

I've been using Blender for 13 years, and I've only seen two major releases: 3.0 and 4.0.

Blender 3.0 (December 3, 2021)

Blender 3.0 key features (that impact me):

• Cycles X
• Asset Browser
• First geometry nodes

This was a real game-changer, but I was spending too much time gaming, so it didn't impact me very much. In fact, I didn't remember that splash screen. I do remember that Cycles X was a huge improvement. If you are going to make an improvement to a 3d application, you can't do better than make the render engine all-around better. I think that 3.0 would have been the most consequential release in Blender's history, except that late 2.x releases included changes that should have been reserved for a major release. Ton had made commitments about what the next major release would include and felt that moving to 3.0 without these promised features would have felt like cheating the community.

Blender 4.0 (October 16, 2023)

Blender 4.0 key features

• Light and Shadow linking
• Principled BSDF and AGF colour transform
• Geometry nodes improvements

Blender 4.0 felt incremental. Lots of minor improvements without a major new feature, although light and shadow linking had been a big ask from the community for a very long time because it's a standard feature in many other applications.

These summaries overlook some incredible developments in EEVEE, Grease Pencil, and the Compositor, because I haven't used them much myself.

Blender 5.0

Blender 5.0 is available in Beta, but for someone who uses a bucket-load of addons, Beta releases are not much fun. It could be, in fact, that I choose not to move over to the new release for a while, as my critical addons become compatible. True Sky is one such addon, and it's also getting a big update very soon, although apparently this isn't tied to the Blender 5.0 release.

Celebration

It doesn't seem right to create a Blender 5.0 celebration render while not using that version. But it is what it is. 

Idea: A space craft landing pod that has crashed into a forest and has been converted into a habitat. Portrait format, for a change.

Midjourney concept image 1

Midjourney concept image 2

Back to the old grindstone

This morning I started with some housekeeping. I updated to Blender 4.x's final update (4.5.4 LTS) before the provisional release of 5.0, in two days.

Rendering in tiles

I looked into using non-default tile sizes for rendering. It seems intuitive to use smaller tiles to use less VRAM when rendering. I'm not sure if this makes sense when running an RTX 5090 with its 32GB of VRAM. Currently, the use of VRAM during rendering is obscured by a limitation of the Vulkan API, which can't track usage.

Tile size: 1024x1024 

Tile size: 2048x2048

In a very quick "off-the-cuff" test of my current scene, we see that a tiny amount of render time and memory was saved by halving the tile size.

Let's try using Persistent Data, where Blender stores render calculations for reuse in follow-up renders. This might be good if, like me, you do an awful lot of iterative renders.

First render with Persistent Data

The follow-on render took seven minutes and five seconds. A catastrophic impact on render time, probably indicating that no clearing out render calculations exhausted available memory, resulting in a drop in performance. For a smaller scene, you can save part of the rendering process and save some time. Not here, though.

Tiles: 512x512

Tiles: 2048x2048 (Default)

So the smaller tiles saved less than ten seconds. That could be important for an animation where a few seconds will stack up over the total render time, but for stills, not huge. I'll stay with the default until I encounter a problem, then try rendering with a smaller tile size.

Back from the Kingdom of the Netherlands

 We visited my sister and her family because they won't be making their usual trip back to see us during the Christmas holidays. It was a smashing break!

Amster-home-of-Blender-Dam!

Had I not come with the family, I'd have made the pilgrimage to North Amsterdam to visit the entrance of the Blender Foundation. Only a thirty-minute walk from the ferry. I'll do it on a future visit.

Leo and Clara, paddling in the North Sea.

Sand-a-blowing

Den Helder lighthouse

What next?

Complete the pre-vis elements of the service road. In the next day or two, I'll go through some required tweaks with the director.

5's almost Alive!

Wednesday sees the release of the Blender 5.0 release candidate. I'll start using it then. I'll create a piece of work to celebrate the release... More on that tomorrow.