Final hours of the Superhive Black Friday Sale... Spend Moah?!

 So I did pick up MatPlus, the layer-based material system that gives Blender a built-in Substance Painter-like functionality. Expensive! But it looks like it's from a reputable and dedicated provider.  I installed it, and found out that it doesn't yet support Blender 5. Erm, no worries. I installed it with Blender 4.5. Still not working. I tested and toyed with it until I was pretty sure this was probably me having missed a prerequisite or an installation step.

I raised the issue on their Discord, providing all the information they might need—and a few hours later, they gave me a workaround (leave the project root directory blank) and promised a fix would be in the next release. Pretty good experience.

The tool looks really good, but I will watch a few tutorials first. I also need to get my UV unwrapping a lot better, which is a sign that my modelling is a bit slapdash.

A better UV unwrap tool may be required. Strokes chin and looks at UVFlow's sale price...

Work for the rest of the week:

• Updates to the next previs service road
• More learning: MatPlus test before I forget I have it and never learn to use it. 
• Practice with TrueSky 3. Some space scenes?

A bigger project for the near future

 While at work yesterday, I thought about the first 3D spaceship that I built. It was part of my undergraduate degree course, using Microstation. That's about 33 years ago?! It would be cool to do a rebuild in Blender 5? I actually did a reasonable rebuild a few years ago (2018?! yikes that long ago), but I had no idea how to light and stage it, so all the renders looked bad.

2018 build

What I would do differently. EVERYTHING.

Firstly, I did my old and bad trick of building everything to its fine-detailed final quality without doing a proper Big:Medium:Small blockout. 

There are some nice detail elements, but the forward section looks more Sci-Fi compared to the central part of the ship, which looks like hard science fiction. I would really sweat the engineering details. The superstructure frame doesn't look structural, like an actual load-bearing system. 

I'd build to a much tighter and finer level of detail, using what I learned from the more recent ship projects:

Bayern build. 2300AD game ship: not my design

Bayern used the Big:Medium:Small approach, and I think it was to scale.

Orbital Elements warship. Needed a bit more work, but I would change a lot now.

So the Ukrainian Space Navy Courier, Igor Shamrayev, is coming soon.