Thursday, 3 September 2026

Wild Geese

 

A honking double-wedge of geese just flew over the house. The cacophony jolted me away from my coffee and reminded me that it's the first day back at school for both boys.

I'm going to miss the peace and quiet.

Things got busy here. Returning to work as the boys return to school. Leo, in fact, is starting secondary school. I made a few more figures; I did some piddling around with terrains. I discovered that Gaea had stopped working. It would refuse to export terrains, complaining about a lack of an appropriate license. As I suspected, installing the early-access version had overwritten my licence file. Quadspinner were very not upfront about the severe limitations on v3. It looks great, but if I can't export terrains, then it's no actual use to me. Roll on November, when I believe we'll see a full (working) release.

I did some test terrains using World Creator. I had tested the Blender Bridge, which lets you push a scene that you're building in World Creator straight into Blender. The tool works better than ever, but not well enough, alas. When I created a large, high-res terrain, I started getting out-of-memory errors in Blender. An issue that doesn't happen when the terrain is exported as an EXR and loaded into Blender via True Terrain 5.

Big terrain exported using the tried-and-tested EXR import method

True Sky version

Interesting results from Gaea testing, once my v2 license file was reapplied. You have to love those complex filters -- the one here that creates broken chunks. The debris is too fine, though. It's a liability unless you were able to render the terrain with 200 million+ polygons.

Gaea 2. working again! 120 million polygon version (in True Terrain 5.2)

Same terrain rendered as above at 1 million polygons (in True Terrain 5.2)

Original Gaea terrain


More figures

Leo photo converted. Leo has also suffered from that weird fleshy eyelash-extrusion problem. I cleaned them up in Blender, mostly.  

babylon.js has replaced the default Windows 3d object viewer. It's really good!

Wild Geese

  A honking double-wedge of geese just flew over the house. The cacophony jolted me away from my coffee and reminded me that it's the fi...