Weekend Reflections

 We're soon going to be getting very busy with Christmas. There's talk of decorating Leo's bedroom before the holiday. It's only me doing the talking, though. I have four more days of work, which should mean lots of Blender time, but I should take a break.

Sparrow project:

I need to create some more landscape concepts. Drew, the director, wants to see more dramatic and more extraterrestrial terrain. I think we're going in a bit lower, which should make it easier to pull off from a viewing distance, but we'll need to account more closely for surface details.

The other landscape artists shared some valuable insights into Geo-Scatter's masking system. Apparently, using Bezier curves to cull scatters is not efficient because it still includes the full scatter in the pipeline, and then removes things under the mask. I've not seen anything documented about their masking mechanics, but Gabe says this comes from Maarten Nauta, so I should definitely take note. Actually, I should seek out Maarten's free YouTube content. Gabe is on his Patreon, so he probably gets 75% more of Maarten's genius leakage. 

Big terrains!! Drew wants the peaks more jagged.

Blender School

I quickly ran through the introduction to Matplus, the Substance Painter-like/lite implementation for a layer-based material creation tool. It's limited to Blender 4.5, and I only have it installed on my secondary machine, which does materials/supporting tasks. Nice! It wasn't wildly complex, and it's definitely inspired by Substance Painter's workflow. You must have really good UVs on your models. You start by baking out the PBR maps that you need. You can apply the layers using various masks and painting options. It is nowhere near as feature-rich or as performant as Substance Painter, but it's in its early days, and it's right inside Blender, so there's no need to swap between them all the time.

I must, must, must:

• Finish the environmental design course.
• Complete the Hard OPs course from the Blender Bros, which has gathered dust for a year.
• Prepare for a purge and reinstallation of Blender when 5.0.1 drops next week.

So key things to remember:

Matplus is a tool that you used in a self-contained workflow. You prep your model, get the UVs in good shape, and then go off and create your materials. Once you are happy, you export the PBR maps, which are applied like any others. If you need to iterate, return to the MatPlus project and repeat the steps. So Matplus is not an extension of Blender's own material/shader creation. 

One is a MatPlus project, the other has PBR map outputs from the project.

CG Characters

This time last year, I downloaded a free sample from CG Characters, a team that was creating really cheap, mid-quality human scans. Their library contained a wild array of genre figures in cool poses. I was tempted to get the set but forgot about it. Well, I hunted them down to see if their library has grown since then. Naughty tinkers have not grown their library as promised; they have a second library that is focused on science fiction characters, available both in various poses and as a T-posed animatable character. Not rigged, though. These figures look slightly better in terms of capture, and their costumes are certainly better -- still a bit cos-play, but the details are more than good enough for background figures.

Not super detailed, but great for medium to far shots

Alexa in her various action poses.

Shamrayev Project

Critique time!

It's dawn on a Sunday morning. The house is quiet, and I'm two coffees down. Lets do some crit!

I stopped work on it last night because it felt like I was tired and letting compromises creep in. A fog had dropped on my critical faculties, and I was at that stage when my modelling carried on by itself, without enough care for design or build quality. A perfect time to stand back, reflect, and take a look with a fresh eye.

So, actually, I'm still happy with the overall effort. There are some places where more care and some rebuilding are needed, but not too much. How is the 70-30 rule applied? Well, it's slightly off, but not enough to worry about. There are areas where the ship is not too cluttered, where the details are already in the realm of the small. So the Big:Medium:Small approach also isn't being applied perfectly, but it's better than it usually is, for sure.

There's no wild rebuild required, just lots of refinement. The next significant effort will be the engineering section. I originally planned for exposed detailing and pines to go behind the shield, but I have decided that some of it will go in front and help pipe up those water tanks. The tanks could become a torus. Are the "ball" tanks too testicular? I still want to include a fold-away mechanism, but I'll not worry about that during this initial design pass.

More later!