Bits and pisces

 Firstly, more crashes. It could be that I've slowly developed unrealistic expectations about the size of terrains that I render. Rendering terrains with 50+ million faces would have been bonkers not a long time ago. Although it's possible to render these massive terrains with Camera culling, when you add True SKY 3 and scatters to the mix, I'm likely experiencing memory exhaustion.

Release 5.0.1 

Expected today. Lots of bug fixes are incoming. Hopefully!

Marker style renders

One of the best near-future concept artists, Maciej Rebisz, has released his Blender Compositor group for turning Blender into a big pack of marker pens. Download it from Gumroad.

This makes my ships look more like Ian Stead's excellent stuff.

So good, you can smell the pen solvents!

Hitem 3D

I've now nearly exhausted my first trial month's allowance on the generative 3D tool Hitem3D. Will I continue to use the service? For one more month, maybe.

You get three free respins for each output.

There is no denying that a generative tool has its uses. How hard/long would it take to retopologise and fix one of the better characters it provided? I think the best outputs come from good photographs rather than Midjourney.

Sparrow Films work

I keep trying to produce the Sci-Fi mountains backdrop that Drew has asked for. I'm not quite there yet, but since I love creating terrains, it's not a big imposition, though it keeps me from making progress on my Shamrayev personal project.

Not what I need, but quite nice terrain patterns