Blue plateau

Blue plateau at last,
the mountain no longer climbs,
Only the wind now tests me.

Terrain test and scene setup

Start of Week

Last week was another productivity slump (for Blender work). I completed three more iterations of the Service Road terrain test. I'm happy with the results, but I think I have a couple more cycles before I declare it ready for the next stage, more in the SOW. I made modest progress on Orbital Elements, but not much. Jeepers, what was I doing last week? Well, my brain has developed a bit of a fixation, and I'm trying to work through it. This week, more work, less endless rumination.

Raptor: Service Road update. I'll complete another iteration and add more detail to the edge of the road. It would be great to add some rock structures to provide flat rock projections in the right places. Some details might need to be added as bolt-on assets.

Other Raptor news: my Sparrow films Hoody should arrive very soon. Hurrah!

MSVC: I've done a lot of sketches. I think it's time I built a light rig using the new design rules.

I still like the idea of a fold-out MFI Ring. This week I will finalise a small-to-medium rig design for building.

Blender School idea

While working on the test scene above, it felt like time to stop relying on True Terrain 3, which has entered an era of very slow development as Richard and Zac juggle TrueVFX work with day jobs. This will mean learning the whole stack for terrain texturing so I can export a terrain, bake the materials, and then use Blender's default systems to finish the terrain. The one element I'm missing is the masking system in True Terrain, which broke in the last big update, as I've mentioned a few times. It makes realistic material masking difficult.

One option is to complete a terrain course; I have one in mind.
https://www.cgboost.com/courses/master-3d-environments-in-blender

I'll look into it more this week and decide over the weekend.

More figures

I realised that I'd not used Hitem3D for more than a week. Those credits won't spend themselves! I need to clarify when the credits need to be used by so I can make sure they don't go to waste.

Prince Albert (Sheffield city centre statue), A Division agent and a fashionable woman