Blender Market Product #2 shǎndiàn Jiàn Review/Rejection

 Where are we with the shǎndiàn Jiàn/Sword of Lightning space vehicle?

Modelling completed. Lots of UV unwrapping, some of which is acceptable. I did learn a lot about UV unwrapping, but this was a big and tricky model to handle if you're inexperienced. 

So I created a bunch of materials, but most of the vehicle was to be baked from Sanctus Library metal shaders with its excellent edge wear and grime systems. However, this is a big lesson for me: a model of this size and complexity requires a lot of PBR maps. Sanctus is pretty easy to use and you can bake textures in a few minutes. However, the results of baked maps are very rough. The truth is, procedural materials are essentially grainless, or can be. When you put that into a map, you get pixelation unless you make the maps impossibly big. Even with restricted texture resolutions of 4k/2k/1k, the amount of VRAM swallowed up is too much. I could go through all the textures and half the resolution and use more compression, but they are already not looking great.

So I'm disappointed. I put a lot of work into the model, which I still like, but I've taken the development down a path that led to bad results. Bad results but good learning, so this isn't entirely negative.

It's not a disaster. There are some okay elements. It's not up to the quality I now demand from myself. I wrote about this not too long ago: The journey of improving your art should see you outgrow your previous standards. The trick is to increase your standards but not let them exceed your capabilities too far. Otherwise, you might walk away from the effort. I'm not walking away, but this model isn't ready to hit the market. I need to create something smaller and more easily delivered.

Other news

1) I got a job. A very modest job cleaning at my son's school. It's modest, but it might be perfect right now. It leaves my brainpower and most of my hours free to continue to pursue Blender as a career. I may not take to it, but I will do my best.

At the same time that I got a call confirming my provisional offer, other people had just jumped ahead in my expectations...

Oh, my giddy aunt. It's more than a week ahead of schedule. Go, SCAN.co.uk! I'm not ready! I was going to tweak the order, but it's too late now. I'll live with 64GB of system RAM; more would rarely be useful, and I specified faster RAM this time.

I need a name! This machine is Athena (named after my Orbital Elements game's historical AI character). The previous machine was ISAC (named after The Division game). It stands for Intelligent System Analytic Computer.

Keep the computing theme? Maybe. Blender-related? Nah, something cool again. I'm putting my thinking cap on. 

Thinking about a project

 I came up with the idea of building a collection of space ship parts to sell on Blender Market. I started sketching out ideas in a shiny-new dead tree sketch pad.

One element that I'll need to manage is exporting Sanctus Library procedural materials as texture maps. That's because they won't instantiate on a customer's system unless they also are running with Sanctus Library.

Where do you start? In the Sanctus Library Bakery, of course!

Instantiate PBR

This is really easy to understand and use. In the Sanctus Library panel in the Shader context is an option to select maps to bake. Once you've selected the render resolution and which channels to bake, you click "Bake" and the material maps are saved into the scene. You can then automatically apply them using the "Instantiate B P R setup".

So, great. I can easily export material maps. However, this might not be plausible/practical for large models as these maps take up a lot more VRAM than I expected. Such is the nature of high resolution PBR, I guess. Maybe I'll bake them smaller and compress the files next time.

That project

A pack of modular space ship parts for Blender