A day for Odin

 Progress Report

I invested a considerable amount of time creating "hero" assets with Nature Generator. It's great, and it seems more stable than I first thought. 

Little rocky heroes

The only screaming limitation is the lack of a built-in material-baking tool. These assets are now plain meshes with the Nature Gen Geometry Node trees applied. Ready to share! However, the materials are still using the addon's procedural systems. To make these rocks easy to share, I'd need to turn the procedural results into PBR textures, which would require that the objects be given good UVs. I may run some tests to see if I can create a UV map for an object while maintaining the great texture results, and then use the baking tool I have from the Sanctus Library.

Quick practice scene

Service Road

I haven't forgotten about the tunnel section of the service road. I had put it off, as I thought the scatter step wasn't going to be much fun. Turns out it was okay.

From above - near cave entrance

View from within the cave

Overview

Next

That scene will need to be optimised. I used detailed assets because they give a much better sense of how much the tunnel is obscured, but at the cost of a very big scene -- about 1GB.

More Blender School! I have courses! I have the last section of the environmental design course to complete.

Stable test

 

Did it crash? Not yet...

A good sign, but this episode of multi-dimensional instability was a punch to my enthusiasm. I walked away from the environmental project for a bit.

Optimisation started

I developed various materials for the light rig, aiming to rig it so that it can be set up quickly in different configurations.

Athena Asteroid -Physical Starlight and Atmosphere sky

Thinking about a return to my Orbital Elements game over the summer. Next week, Blender 4.5 goes into full release (hopefully), and the road to Blender 5.0 begins. Exciting, but hopefully things will be more stable.

More Project Assets

 This one took a couple of attempts. It's not 100% complete or right, but it came together without me hating it.

Lighting Rig

It was one of the things that a base needs. I decided to go mobile instead of using a built-in option.

I'm going to briefly halt the Environmental course to actually create a scene with the lessons I've learned so far. Some of the lessons are subtle and about judgment rather than Blender techniques. I'll forget them unless I apply them soon.

I'll continue to work on the project assets and scene. I've been asked to halt work on the location, either because the script may be changing or I'm not going in the right direction.

Asset test and terrain practice

Assets in play!

 I had to play with some World Creator terrains, as there's a new beta out which reportedly fixed the bug that I reported. In all the excitement about sculpting terrain, I didn't actually complete testing for the bug. I have faith!

Yesterday

I experimented with a new add-on. I created an interior in which I planned to scatter some bitter gourds (I created the scan this weekend). Alas, while the tool appears to work well, I was unable to get the scatters to conform to the nominated ground object. Maybe it only works on a plane?

A case of Floatia Scatterous

Asset farming

 A break for terrains. Actually learning something useful, thanks in large part to the environmental design course.

Key lessons:

• You can do a lot using the Project from View UV Unwrap. Piotr is maybe the fourth artists who said they use it for about 90% of their work. This could be a concept artist's approach-"move quickly and don't quite build things properly"-but it's working for now.
• Procedural textures have a lot going for them: driving variation with seed values and being able to tweak parameters. Low memory cost (at the expense of other resources, especially with lots of complex node trees. However, they really don't tell the kind of stories that real-world photo sources can capture. 
• Use the UV editor to find interesting alignments with source images that are not even remotely seamless. Seamless textures are critical in the long run, but for fleshing out the materials of an environment, it's all about the character of surfaces.

So I started with some base artefacts.

First Asset: Small concrete barriers; so-called "cement sentries"

The texture maps are home-grown. I then realised that for PBR I'd need to generate some supporting maps using Materialise, but it stopped working because of missing framework components.

I recalled that there was an addon that automatically generated the required maps from a target colour map. It's pretty cheap, too. 

Pbr Texture & Material Generator For Blender

What's nice is this tool is very intuitive, once you realise that materials you "create" are all in memory until you save the maps out and turn them into an asset. My materials were disappearing because I mistakenly thought that "what the monkey sees, money keeps".

Its documentation is minimal, but this is one of those cases where keeping things simple allows users to install and use with minimal head scratching.

To be clear, this isn't a one-click-and-done solution. All the default materials have excessive specularity, so my concrete blocks appear too slick and shiny. However, the adjustment parameters are available to make the necessary adjustments.

Next asset: A modular wall section

Something a bit bigger

Something modular

Next up: Continued training from Piotr's Environmental Design course