Production Meeting

 The Halo: Raptor Project had the latest production meeting. It was good to catch up. The non-NDA-breaking gist: We need to up our work rates, we have a new and exciting commitment, and there's a drive to get together more to watch stuff, play games, and hang out. All good plans!

I really have fallen into a low-productivity slump — partly because the current task is very difficult to do well. I'm not yet ready for deep geonodes R&D, so I have been tackling the same technical challenges for months using the same toolset. I need to widen my technical skills and confidence with Blender's more advanced elements.

I need to be pushing my training more—if you, for some crazy reason, read these posts, you'll know I talk about getting training done far more than I actually do the training. Blame my ADHD! Writing this blog is 50% an attempt to hold myself to account for not meeting creative milestones or delivering on productivity commitments.

Random photo of my old school

My mind wandered as I searched for the shots I created (below) and just added a photo of Myers Grove School. This school was demolished to make way for a brand-new school, Forge Valley.

Oh, look, terrains!

Moah Nova

I was looking back at a post from about four years ago when I was using World Creator's ability to create seamless terrain tiles, so you could duplicate and match up. This is a capability that wasn't carried over to the latest version -- sadly. Moah Nova is a huge (16km terrain tile), baked out of True-Terrain, decimated to about 20 million polygons, then instanced and mirrored so that it can tile nicely.

Old old terrain that I had a quick look at. I need to audit the terrains I've created.

Today

Gather yesterday's sculpted mountains and arrange them in shot 002, along with the lake plate. Then work out how to incorporate canyons in the foreground. Do a low-res block-out version before worrying about any details.

Back to work - part 2

 Yesterday, I returned to my part-time job for one shift. It was actually a nice break, very quiet. I started at 8am and was heading home at 11:20. Clara's brother was visiting Sheffield with his friend, so we spent the rest of the day doing housework and preparing for an evening meet-up.

So, not much was done yesterday. Tonight there is a production meeting for Halo: Raptor at 11pm. Well past my usual bedtime, it has to be said.

View-aligned Voronoi Islands

Thomas Kole is a technical artist who dedicated his free time to building a near-perfect replica of Tenochitilan. Seriously good work -- driving the project forward through clever cheating. The takeaway from this presentation is that when the terrains get big, cheat with everything that you can. For example, you can't scatter over hundreds of square miles of terrain without a very complex fragmentary render-flow. Instead, Thomas developed shader-based solutions for handling the forests and much of the city.

http://www.chengfolio.com/google_map_customizer#satellitemap
I use this to capture bits of Google mapping terrain. You need to use it as a starting point rather than use it directly, or you will get Google watermarks in your terrains. If you capture an area using overlapping screen captures that you stitch together in your favourite image editor, you can get massively detailed real-world terrain from which you can clone and paint your own landscapes.

https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/
This handy wrapper captures Google Map height data and filters it to generate heightmaps. This would be indispensable if only it could export high-bit-depth EXRs. Still worth using!

https://cloud.maptiler.com/maps/
This commercial service offers a free but limited account. It does both the texture and height-map generation really well. Useful for capturing a real-world geographic location in 3D.

Back to work - part 1

 It's time to return to my Halo: Raptor chores. This didn't stop me from doing the initial rough measurements of the Project: Hail Mary ship. 

Overall Length: 136m

Instead of my infection getting better, I feel worse today. My head isn't right. Back to my part-time job, tomorrow morning. It's going to hit me like a ton of bricks unless I'm really well rested, so I might have an early, early night.

Happy Chocolate

 I'm officially out of time for my personal project. It was fun. There's a lot more I should be doing, but I need to get back to the "job".

Tall renders are so rare

The ring structure was a rare bit of kitbashing, using a ringed space station I built in March 2023.

I keep replicating the sections. This is about 500m deep. Blender crashes if I try to delete one of the instance collections.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Good Friday, fallow Friday

 Happy Easter, peeps!

Test lamp down at the base...just not enough light down there.

Weird holiday that requires some serious mental gymnastics to transmute into a "celebration". Chocolate does so much heavy lifting!

I still feel very rough, maybe not quite as rough. It's now nearly a week since I did my regular resistance training and walking. I feel a bit "fallow", but I need to start pushing myself, even if I don't feel good.

Clara is on a late shift, so I need to get some groceries to feed the boys tonight.

Blender

I made a bit of progress on the apartment complex yesterday. Working mostly to improve the materials and UVs in key places. Not a lot of work, but some nice tweaks here and there. I'm particularly pleased with the single plane that I textured with a high-contrast noise map, which is placed behind the window panes of each apartment block. This provides a random element that breaks up the unrealistic unity of the many windows.

Much of the remaining work will be about breaking up regularity and adding more detail in the right places.

So, what's next?

Firstly, the version of the scene where I had created two more tunnel instances crashed when I tried to delete them. I've reverted to the single instance-version of the scene. If I want the apartments to rise higher, I need to let more light in. When there are apartments that rise into the sky, they block most of the light, and it just gets too dark.



I will do an animation for this scene, to be completed by Monday. I need to create a storyboard and use that to work out where I need more details. There's a good foundation for some scenes, but I need to break up the regularity. For example:

• Something to break up the regularity of the railings.
• Signs, notices and decals
• Street lights
• Street furniture
• Rubbish and clutter
• Crowds? 
• Something in the central pool? 
• Cables and wiring
• More pipes

That water is looking good. It's from the Sanctus Library

Incredible things

 

In this hellish, wartorn timeline, it's very gratifying to have a brief moment where we remember that there is competence, dedication and a striving for something bigger. Manned space exploration no longer lands the same way as it did when I was Leo's age. This isn't a battle of ideology because is the Trump administration really any different from the CCP? Granted, they have replaced the huge bureaucratic party system with a gold-plated ballroom, but it's not East vs West, Totalitarianism vs Freedom. Watching NASA people sweat details was the competence porn I so very much needed. I hope their missions succeed, and watching this stuff together might pull some people out of the Trump stupor.

Blender

Lurgi and gum pain diminished, but not gone. What a waste of a week. Well, almost. My dystopian apartment block continues to rise.

Shell game

working on improving the materials a but

A giant pool of water at the bottom.

Apartments

I think we wrap this up for creating a short animation over the weekend evenings. Nothing dramatic, maybe some pans across, up, and down from different locations. 

First, we need to find a way to add some variations. The light from the apartment windows needs to be broken up. I think I might be able to put a giant plane behind each "bank" of apartment windows to adjust the amount of light emitted. I need to break up the walkways, maybe add some low-poly denizens. Some more pipes, clutter, and lamps. Maybe I'll put some boats/barrels/trash in the central pool. 

I need a bit more light in the depths. The aim was to have this tower three instances high, but at that point, the bottom is truly a gloomy place.

Forbidden porridge

 It seems like I wasn't supposed to have porridge this morning, but I really fancied some. I have it about once a week. It takes a lot longer to prepare than my usual breakfast of Greek yoghurt with blueberries and nuts. I still feel very low, and a nice warm bowl of porridge would just hit the spot. My gum pain has subsided, possibly to make room for a very sore back. My cold has got to my chest, causing me to rasp. My unwellness has worsened. Bleh! So, I wanted my porridge.

First, the digital scales are mysteriously broken. Delving into the mystery, I might have recently set a heavy pan on top of it, which could have caused the LCD to break. I can be breathtakingly clumsy. Mr Bean without the laughs.

So, how do you measure 50g of rolled oats? I managed to find a conversion for measuring in cups. Then, after not finding any measuring cups, I found a conversion for tablespoons. So far, so good. Except I think I messed up the measure of milk, which I modified to include some of my yoghurt, for its fat content. I needed more fluid as the oats were getting too hot. I gave the pan a quick nudge to move the contents around, but nothing was stuck together, so globs of milk and porridge went onto the hob. Some must have worked its way into a dial's recess, which causes the sparker for lighting the hob to  continuously fire...on...and..on...and...on

So now, twenty minutes after finishing my porridge — which was perfect, at least I got that — there is a clicking sound coming from the kitchen, with a one-second interval. Why did I get out of bed? That was actually the back pain! If it wasn't for my sore lower back, I would have just stayed in bed all day. Meh.

Yesterday

While some might spend their sick time watching comforting TV shows or YouTube cat videos, I elected to start building a dystopic prison-style apartment complex.

It's the framework. It needs more material touches and detailing, but not bad for a few hours' work. Odd, odd thought. The old British slang for prison/prison-time is porridge. *Stares into the void*

Under the weather #1 2026 edition

 I officially have a mild case of the dreaded lurgi. My throat burns with a mysterious fire, and my head is full of cotton wool. I feel like I need my batteries changing. The gum pain is present, but is currently only contributing to the chorus line of my momentary lived experience. Meh!

Today will not see any profound contributions in any field. Yesterday I spent three hours mopping a staircase and wiping grime off the walls of a corridor. That was worthy, that felt like a worthy contribution. I came home and then did an hour of housework. That also felt worthy, but I also felt proper-tired. By dinner, I was at a very low ebb, and it was then that I realised that I was actually poorly.

So about today...

Detailed References are limited. When, see Rocky streaming, question!

The wild idea of creating a highly detailed replica of Project: Hail Mary was, on reflection, peak ADHD. This is an incredibly detailed thing, and while it has a basic overall form, there are thousands of elements that need to be carefully measured and made. Now, this is something that I want to do, but I may tackle it very slowly. I must break the cycle of jumping excitedly into a new shiny thing, then abandoning the effort when a new shiny thing pops into my view.

Easter-break begins

 Firstly, Project: Hail Mary is an absolute triumph of an adaptation. It manages to fly along with just the right amount of exposition -- enough to tell you exactly what is going on without the deep-diving of the book. I loved all those deep dives, but in the cinematic world of show-don't-tell, it has to go.  I understand that the first cut of the film was about four hours long, so it seems like the heavy lifting of adaptation was all done in the editing suite. Bravo!

I am trying to dissuade myself from starting a highly detailed build of Mary, herself. I did a build after finishing the book, based on the schematic the author created. Master SF concept artist Paul Chadeisson took the broad idea and changed the very simple but scientifically plausible layout into a fascinating visual character that has maybe 85% of the book version's plausibility but is 400% more interesting.

I love the design, and I love that it's not too difficult to build. I might see what I get out of two hours. If I nail the big forms, it might happen. I can't find any decent blueprints, so far.

Halo: Raptor

I must progress the terrain and catch up. I've proven that a tile-based approach will work for creating large, detailed terrain. I need the right tiles and the right arrangement. I have a big lake section for the centre. Next, I need a range of mountains for the back, then foothills and canyons at the front.

Lower-level foothill tiles

EndMarch

 A bad night's sleep and gum pain have given the start of the Easter break a bit of a sour flavour. Still, I've been quite productive after a walk into the city centre mid-morning. Cold and a bit rainy, but pleasing to the spirit.

Not from today, but this is the same route -- home is located near the high-rise buildings in the distance.

Big landscapes

I cooked up a couple more big terrain tiles in World Creator. The process is pretty simple, though it can take a while for the chain to complete.

1. Create a True-Terrain scene as normal, using (in my case) a large EXR displacement file.
2. Once the terrain is textured and you are happy with its state, bake the geometry by making sure that the viewport resolution is set to 1.0. This will result in a potentially huge terrain object. 
3. Select the terrain and apply the True-Terrain modifier stack. This will bake the geonodes tree into a fixed mesh. This can take several minutes.
4. Add a Decimate modifier. I set mine to 0.4, which reduces the resolution by about half. You can adjust this step to achieve the level of mesh detail that suits your wants and needs. This can take several minutes.

Consider saving and cleaning up the scene file after each of the last two steps as it looks like these steps may exhaust your system memory. I had crashes early, possibly because I interfered with Blender while it was in a trans.

5. Once you have your terrain tile, Press Alt+D to create an instance, spin it on the Z-axis and move the new instance to create a new section of landscape, hopefully without visible repeating. Repeat until you have all the giant terrain of your dreams.

An 8-instance tile-set. Each spun to hide the fact that it's the same section of terrain being repeated.

                                                                    

It's flexible and (if you instance correctly) should be pretty efficient.

  Excited about tomorrow as I'm taking the family to see Project: Hail Mary, one of the favourite books from last year. I may be burning with inspiration for a space scene, this time tomorrow.                                                                                                    

I did a quick scene this afternoon, based on a photograph of a dark corridor illuminated by skylights. The scene I created was simpler, but I was still satisfied to generate an animation in less than ten minutes.

Dark Corridor

GeoScatter update and it's Friday

 

Geoscatter is finally compatible with Blender 5.1. Better late than never, Geoscatter! :-) 
This is great news! Although I have happily chugged along with 5.0.1, and will do so for Sparrow Film work -- because it's our production version. That said, you need to keep up with changes and improvements, so I try to work on the latest for my own work, unless there's a specific roadblock.

Big Terrains Done with Tiles

I note that nearly all the huge terrains that I've seen built have consisted of terrain tiles loosely slapped together. Apparently done right, you don't need to worry about seams.

That theory appears to hold up!

I have a lake tile. I just need big mountains to go behind the lake, then the canyons to go in front. It will be sorted soon.

Thursday runtime/funtime

 I did an early run this morning. I was at the Morrisons supermarket at Hillsborough for its opening at 7am. I felt great, although I had to walk back to avoid damaging the stuff I'd bought, which included some glass cooking oil bottles. I felt great at 8, fine at 9, but by the time I was half an hour into my shift at 2, I felt like...a nap.

Lesson: Don't go for the first run in months/years and not expect some serious energy-level troughs through the rest of the day.

I was happier with the direction my terrain tests were taking, but not quite there yet. I will do another final test tomorrow, keeping the rises to a minimum and making the canyon channels a bit deeper and longer. The latest idea is to create a repeatable plate that can be instanced a few times to give the impression of a super-detailed area.

The terrain that I last rejected was still quite cool, so I had some fun dressing it.

High contrast, big rabbit

Foggy drama with bunting

Bunting for the bunny god!

Tomorrow: That training I was supposed to do. I'll do an hour or two.

Finish something: Hmm, tricky. This piece is finished; it's a quick play-around, not a full project. I do itch to build a space vehicle, but I'm too far behind on the Halo terrain efforts.

1 year on

 Today is the first anniversary of my part-time job. How the time has whizzed by with sickening speed. Time does that, these days. It never drags, it always stacks up air miles.

I'll treat my work colleagues to some sweet things.

Halo: Raptor

Time to have another go at the big broken terrain. Getting Canyons to look right has been tricky. I'm clearly not applying terrain deformation/erosion in a way that sells the realism. It's time to fall back on good references.

What I'm looking for is the river-carved-into-the-rock effect. Not like a valley where the slopes are gentle, it really just looks like river flow eats away the ground, leaving a flatish terrain interrupted by steep, deep canyons?

I thought about recreating the whole service road section within this terrain tile, but that seems like a lot of work that would mostly be wasted on an establishing shot. I proceed with a more general approach. I need to get the overall terrain right first.

11 Weeks, 4 days

 Here we are. Spring, 2026. The calendar people have been here for 23 days, while those of us who look at the Vernal Equinox, the point when day and night are equal in length, hit the milestone on the 20th.

There's more light, which is daylightful!

This week

I need to complete the next terrain section for Halo: Raptor. I spent some time over the weekend doing a larger-scale/higher-resolution sculpt of the broken terrain/canyon component. It's better than it was -- thanks to the use of multiple sculpt tiles, which increases the sculpting resolution limit from 1024x1024 to 4k. 

Sharing as I'm rejecting this effort. The scale is wrong and the canyons are too inconsistent. 

Complete some of the personal project stuff: Ships/House/Terrains, etc., etc., before starting anything else.

Complete some training content. I have oodles of stuff waiting to be completed. Complete something!

Terrain dabblement

The beginning of an Easter-related piece. It might get some Easter eggs, shortly

Blender School - blending object materials

 

Blending into the ground

There are techniques for placing terrain assets to blend with the ground material and remove obvious seams. The same technique can be used in other situations, but this scenario was raised by Drew, the director. Given that I try these things, then forget what I did some weeks or months later, I thought I'd make this a Blender School post.

Technique 1: Geo-Nodes (From James Combridge)

 Concept: Create a mask to apply to an object's material that checks the distance from the ground object.

Object info node that looks at the Relative position of the GroundPlane Object via the Geometry Proximity Node (distance). The result is pushed through the Stored Named Attribute node and is given the name GroundMask. Simples!

The Rock (object) material gets the Ground material added via a Mix Shader node using the "GroundMask" attribute we just set up.

For more control over the blend placement, make the following edit to the GroundMask:

Take the Geometry Proximity output and feed it through a Map Range, using its adjustments to fine-tine where the blend happens. You can further improve the look by adding another Map Range, mixing them (Mix node) using a Noise Texture as the factor.

Technique 2: Normal Mapping (From SpennyFX)

SpennyFX looked at an alternative to the above technique using normals.

First tip: These materials shouldn't be wildly different or the results are not likely to be convincing, at least close up.

This technique produces a more ambient-occlusion-like mask suitable for smaller objects.

The factor for the Mix node is the object's normal separated on the Z-axis and pushed through a colour ramp (default) that is adjusted to mix in the ground to the bottom of your target objects.

There's a third technique available that I won't go into here. It handles the blend as a compositor step. See more about it on the CG Matters channel.

Testing Blender 5.1

In spite of a number of quirky errors, Blender 5.1 looks functional. The only major addon that remains incompatible (as far as I've tested) is Geoscatter.

Small teams don't always have the bandwidth to update addons prior to a new Blender release. That's fine. I would maybe not sling mud, though. Blender has updated its underlying Python version. It seems a bit unfair to characterise this as "breaking" most addons. It's a major, breaking product change, but it's well understood and planned. It falls on addon developers to track and keep their products up-to-date.

I guess that Geoscatter will be updated in due course, and it's possible that Blender 5.1 might need a hotfix if any serious issues fall out of general use.

Breakthrough.. I think

 

World-Creator limits its sculpt tile to 1024x1024 pixels. You just can't make fine-detailed terrains or coastlines with the sculpt layer. Solution: Use an array of sculpt tiles and carefully blend them to create a seamless, high-resolution terrain sculpt. The coastline comes out so much better this way. 

The next challenge will be to blend this lake plate into a larger terrain with mountain ranges in the background and a canyon-like badlands in the foreground.

Blender 5.1

Is due to be released today. I tested the Release Candidate last week. It wasn't supported by many of my critical (True-VFX) addons, so I ended up not using it in anger.

[Update] Blender 5.1 released and installed along with a flurry of critical addons. It looks like most things are working. Geoscatter is one addon that looks to be awaiting a necessary update.

Other stuff I should think about

Finish something!
I have about six "projects" that are just waiting to be worked to a level of completion. Maybe get some of them done?

Do some more training!
I have a bunch of courses waiting to be completed. Some I haven't even started.

Terrain therapy

There's a new World Creator release (2026.3) that resolves the instability issues I experienced in the last build. I've enjoyed testing it because, if you've read any three posts on this entire blog, you will know that I love noodling with terrain. I just need to push myself into the less safe territory of finishing landscape scenes.

Mountain place

Strata slope

Lake under a ridge

Thoughts about massive terrain scenes

 This current shot has had me stumped. I think I know why. Very high-altitude shots are just a lot bigger than you think. At 1000m altitude, you can see 70km -- it's a Pythagorean theorem application.

70km is a lot of landscape. It's far more than you could ever see from the ground.

70km is about the span of the Alps

Break

 I didn't get time for any Blender, yesterday. A rare thing! I'd only had three hours of sleep and my head never quite made it to planet Earth.

I did some drawing for a t-shirt. It's based on a sculpture in the grounds of my son's school. 

It really is time to get this giant terrain scene done. I'm looking at how I need to change my approach to accommodate its massive scale.

1) Smoke and mirrors
I need to stop trying to brute-force full scenes with high-poly scatters. There really shouldn't be any scatters at this altitude.

2) Consider using render layers

Instead of doing the whole scene in a single pass, break it down. It takes a lot more planning, but it can be the only practical way of rendering especially complex scenes.

3) Look at what the top artists do
There are plenty of great Youtube videos that cover terrain scenes. There are a couple of courses too. I still need to finish one of them. (Ultimate 3D Environment Animation Course - Blender)

Roofy cabin progress

 

It seemed a bit premature to start worrying about materials, but I needed to add some oomph to the model in order to get a feel for where to go next.

I gave up on building my own furniture and used the ABO Connect add-on to pick a nice table and chairs from a library of nearly 8,000 assets. Phew, that was £3 well spent!

I think the window frames will be better in a darker material. Also, I might add blinds to the windows on the first and second floors. The roofing tiles are not quite right. The material is not quite aligned with the tile geometry. I think the whole cabin needs to sit on some decking, with a drainage system running along the bottom to drain the runoff, or you'd soon get flooded.

I am toying with the idea of rooms extruding from the roof, maybe along with a chimney stack. 


Halo:Raptor

I've been trying to find my massive-terrain mojo. I need to really take care with the same of landforms, my 32km-long terrains have the wrong scales for mountains, there are not enough big, long flows.

Scales are wrong. The canyons need to be a lot narrower but not so deep.

Near the Hoover Dam. This is about 30km long

Reality has mind-blowing levels of detail. Impossible to represent from a World Creator sculpt, although I could do much better to suggest the right layers of detail -- big forms that are not too uniform. My sculpts are just a lot of continuous undilation. Above you see the mountains having long drainage channels to the lake.

More observation required!