Unfinished but a positive step

It's possible that I got lost in the details too soon. That said, this is a very simple project that was never intended to be elaborate or detailed, so all's good. 

I definitely turn up the juice too soon, causing the many small iterative steps to take too long as we wait for renders to complete. Get more done in the viewport. I must be more careful with in-situ previewing, not after a 5-minute render, only to spot a glaring error that should have been obvious from the start.

Crit time

• The wall needs to look older, with more chipping and stain patterns. The tiles are okay as a starting point, but they need to blend into the wall rather than look like bathroom tiles.
  
  
• The sky is good, but I may match the source images better by backlighting the scene and pushing the lower part of the wall into deeper shadow.
  
  
• I added post-effects using Photographer—a real crutch for me. Too soon, but I like the vibe of the harsh film noise, enabled instead of using Blender's noise reduction, which tends to mush renders too much.

My son is supposed to be the figure walking along the wall. He didn't turn up for a scan when I asked, so we'll see if he becomes part of the scene. Maybe I should create a body for the scene and capture a detailed head (via Hitem3D) to place on it. Naturally, this gives you a lot more detail on the head, where it counts.

That's enough for now. I will finish the project off, but not today. It's time to get back to work on the terrain testing for Halo: Raptor.

Start of Week

Last week I did updates to the service road path painting. I got sign-off again. Which didn't work out great last time, but hay-ho. To use the path as a displacement mask, it needs to be much more detailed, so today I will upscale it to 16-24k super detail.

This path needs to be translated into a workable terrain, proving that Gaea 2.0 has the chops for this effort. For an isolated section like this, it certainly does. The question remains: can Gaea handle very large, detail-specific terrains?

Product idea

I'm engaged with my writing project again. It has me thinking about 23rd-century space vehicles. The idea I had a couple of years ago (see here) to create a set of modular parts that enable quick kit-bashing of space vehicles keeps pulling me in. It would take a lot of prep, but it seems much better focused than when I first started.

I'll do some more sketching and planning regarding module types and numbers. There are some geo-node add-ons that provide a framework for these sorts of systems, where a user can just interact with a UI and Blender's geometry nodes system does all the heavy lifting.

Bits what bolt together