Blessed are the weekends that keep you moving and stop you from overthinking (too much). This may be one such weekend. Clara is working night shifts, so I have a bit more cooking and cleaning on my daily to-do lists.
Our washing machine is no longer able to discharge water effectively. It's given us a good decade of service, so Clara has decided to skip the "get someone to fix it" stage of appliance grief and move straight to accepting that we need a new one.
Gaea 2.3
More Gaea experimentation and practice. I've seen a lot more instability than I expected. Yesterday I worked for several hours on a moderately complex terrain tree, only for Gaea to cause a hard crash (black screen of death "your system needs to restart")
It then confounded me further by forgetting my license information and blocking 8k-resolution builds until I went to the Quadspinner website and reactivated my license. Weird! My account now acknowledges that I have a Gaea 3.0 license pending, which is good—a sign that early access really is coming soon... probably.
Clouds on the horizon
True-VFX, the developer of amazing Blender add-ons, provided sad news this week: Zach is moving on to a new job. Richard will also be looking for alternative/supplementary work away from Blender. This is sad for users and fans of their work, but it seems like a growing trend in the Blender add-on development space—building complex add-ons and selling them for a one-off fee is no longer viable over the years. The economics of maintaining and developing those add-ons based on a one-off cost isn't working, as sales growth (very strongly) tends to drop to a trickle. The Superhive market initiative to build in/enforce a support payment model isn't popular because Blender's community is addicted to the word "free", and is maybe too little, too late.
Both True Terrain and True-Sky are great as they are, though the latest version of True Terrain has a bug that fundamentally breaks my workflow because image masks no longer align with the heightmap. While you can move the masks to manually line them up, in practice, there isn't enough clarity or control in the viewport to do so reliably. I hope the guys can make a quick fix to align with the Blender 5.2 release, due in a couple of weeks.
Blender 5.2
Key changes:
- Thin walls -- a change to shaders for supporting very thin materials.
- New dynamic cloth solver -- Blender improves physics with a dynamic solver for cloth.
- Collider -- a new collider system for physics interactions.
- Texture Caching -- better management of VRAM when building a scene.
- Loop tools -- finally become a default set of tools. Long overdue, apparently.
- Compositor can use GPU acceleration.
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