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!

Ohh nice

Seen on the new Sanctus website. Weird moment. Nice moment! 

Time-slip

 I seem to have drifted across the week, fulfilling basic requirements like eating, working and occasionally getting low-quality sleep. I'm getting behind with my Halo: Raptor commitments, so today is the day I start to turn that around, after a number of false starts.

Other stuff

I turned my attention to terrains...would you believe?!

Testing True-Vault assets

Brushed off a terrain sculpt from last year. I like! Let's scatter!

Na bad, but let's lower the P.o.V

Okay, but now we need some points of focus that aren't default cubes.

I'll whip up a quick model! Narrator: Quick models are never quick.

Posh cabin design - in progress

Next: Back to work on Halo: Raptor.
Then: Finish the cabin and place it into the terrain

And after that: Complete those PlantFactory tutorials, and some more of Cov's environmental training course, then, then.... Deep breaths and FOCUS.

Winter gloom begins to lift

 There seems to be more light and more moderate temperatures, which is raising my spirits a bit. The weekend was restful. I had jobs to do and got a bit of walking done. So work was due to begin this morning. Instead, I had some family issues to resolve, followed by a trip to donate a lot of old shirts that were too big for me.

Tomorrow morning, I will get back to work on the Halo: Raptor scene.

Terrains!

RiverEEn scene -- a test!

KrasnovMountains test scene.