A deep dive into Cableator

Firstly, a progress report on the terrain...

I'm pleased with the topology in general. The snow mask is a bit leaky, so it isn't bright white like I'd hoped. The ridges are less pronounced, Gabe's mountain is less nuanced, but it sells the landscape better -- it just looks authentic. Right now, I'm thinking of conceding and retooling to use Gaea. Maybe I'll give it a second pass, but it will need to wait. In the meantime, Gabe issued an update to his terrain. <I make a face>

I think I will be getting to grips with Gaea very soon. Gaea 3.0 early access is due out next month.

Back to the Random Flow personal project

I decided to throw a lot of design elements into the Random Flow structure -- like I said, you need to balance random greebles with stuff that shows clear intent, tells a story, and/or presents recognisable, realistic elements that set both scale and context -- like ladders, doors, lamps, etc.

To this end, I don't have time to build many custom models. Instead, I gathered some models I've built over the last few years and stripped off some elements for a kitbash. I don't do much kitbashing because modelling and designing are my thing. This is a good example of where having a library of bits is useful for getting something out the door.

I want to add a bunch of realistic pipes and cables to the structure. This part I will build, but I will call upon the aid of some Blender addons - firstly, Cableator.

Let's do a deep dive:

Blender-School: Cableator

Documentation: https://cablerator.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Do you need an addon in order to create a curve, edit its start and end points, then make it into a solid? No, but if you want it to be really quick and easy, then Cableator is way ahead of the curve!

For openers: two ways to make a cable

1) Create a cable by choosing endpoints. This is the most straightforward method.
2) Draw Cable by drawing a path. This gives you more path control, but it tends to be erratic, adding lots of control points that make your cable twist in ugly, broken ways. 

Create a cable (Docs)

1. Click on polygons to define start and end points of the cable. Hold Ctrl/Cmd to snap to polygon centre;

2. Adjust cable width with S, cable tension (length) with D;

3. Hold Shift while changing values to make values more precise;

4. Hold Ctrl/Cmd while changing values to snap to 0.05 steps;

5. Change other options like twist mode, resolution and subdivisions;

6. Left Click to confirm the cable;

• If there’s a cable selected before creating a new one, the same cable width or profile will be used by default;

• If there’s a curve without width selected before creating a new one, the same curve will be used as a profile;

• If there are one or two endpoints of a different curve selected, these points will be used as starting points;

• If another bezier curve point was used as a starting point, there will be an option to join the curves with J key;

• Press Q while in modal to quickly add another cable;

Draw a cable

1. By default the cable will snap to visible geometry. Press D to switch between Surface and Cursor pen depth;

2. Draw with Left Click-Drag;

3. Undo with Ctrl+Z;

4. Confirm with Right Mouse Button or Esc;

• If there’s a cable selected before creating a new one, the same cable width or profile will be used by default;

• If there’s a curve without width is selected before creating a new one, the same curve will be used as a profile;

Editing Cables

• Width (S): width of the cable.

• Tension Delta (D): changes the cable tension (length).

• Resolution (F): cable length resolution.

• Tilt Cable (I): tilts the cable and automatically recalculates tilt values for all points.

• Bevel Resolution (V): cable profile resolution (if no curve profile is used).

• Scale Profile (T): curve profile scale (if a curve profile is added).

• Offset the Closest Point (Shift+W): offsets the point closest to the mouse cursor.

• Grab Profile (B): grabs a profile from the active doc or from the ext doc (switch with Shift+B).

• Twist Method (H): controls how the curve twists in 3D space; changing this can help remove curve artifacts.

• Show Wire (X): toggles Wire mode on/off for the curve. Wire mode is turned off on finish.

• Fill Caps (C): adds caps to the ends of cables.

• Set Bevel Object (A): assigns a profile to the cable.

• Move a Point (M): reattaches the point closest to the mouse cursor to a different face of any object.

Create a complex-form cable (ribbed cable)

1. Create a cable where you want the complex cable. Scale it down so it's not visible. You only need the path.

2. Create the rib section out of a cylinder. Remove the end cap faces after creating an inset.

3. Scale the cylinder, bevel the edges.
4. Select the cable, bring up the Cableator menu and select Add or Edit Segment.

5. Use Array (C) to bridge the path.

You have a ribbed cable! So dang easy!

Simulate

Select the meshes before selecting an existing Cableator cable to add them as collision solvers. Then, when the simulation runs, Blender does its level best to account for realistic object collision. It doesn't always work, but there are tools to improve results. Even so, a tweak here and there is much easier than manually staging realistic cables.

1. Create a cable and complete it.

2. Select meshes with which you want the cable to detect/collide. 

3. Run Simulate.

4. Probably fix. There are some post-simulation options that can help improve outputs. 

The game's afoot!

 Gabe has provided a Gaea-created terrain that I will attempt to match in World Creator. He's not gone out of his way to make this extra-difficult; it doesn't use any wildly complex erosion forms. However, it's still shows that Gaea output can just look very natural straight out of the door. This could still be a challenge.

I should have specified that the results should be shown in Blender, because the test is for terrain forms, not Gaea's native rendering/materials capabilities.

 Gabe's challenge. See his work: https://www.artstation.com/gabe_dobsky

Start of the week

Last week's aims:

Scene 002: I made progress by going to the asset preparation. Mostly the city and the depot, which are close to completion. That's a tick! I will finish the scene this week.

Superhive trades: Some thought. Nothing structured, nothing like a plan. Given that I paid out a fortune to get a porch roof repaired, I really need to focus more on bringing in some money. Put this into this week's aims.

Blender School: I actually looked into two areas:

Random Flow
I followed the more recent tutorial, and I have a practice exercise, the results of which I will show off tomorrow. It's still an amazing tool, but you need to use it right; too many users think it's all you need for surface detail, but it's got to be balanced with designed elements, or it looks obviously like a lot of random greebles.

Panels, Extrusions, and Slices. Scratching the surface of Random Flow!

HardOps/Boxcutter
Oh gawd, I think I have completely lost all the knowledge. I struggled to do something really basic with Boxcutter, and the notes I created in this blog didn't help much. A proper refresher will be required. Frustrating, but at least I know it's an issue.

This week's new aims:

Complete Gabe's challenge, today. Strict time-box! I need to complete Scene 002, this week.

The Random Flow practice exercise: Today/Tomorrow. This is a personal effort that shouldn't bleed into the working week, but if it isn't finished by the end of tomorrow, it won't be. One of the reasons it didn't get finished is that I am trying to be a lot more active during weekends. I spend much of one day getting out into the world and taking photos. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lucasdigital/

Photography

Some of yesterday afternoon's efforts:

City Centre from Parkwood Springs

Looking back towards home, from Parkwood Springs

JUUUUUUUUUNE

 Shout-out to the BBC sitcom from my childhood, Terry & June. Many, if not most, episodes would end with hapless middle-aged husband, Terry, in some comedic high-speed crisis calling out for his wife, "JUUUUUUUUUNE".



So it goes that hapless middle-aged Blender user, me, calls out that we have already arrived at the Middlemonth (t.m). Where does the time go? I can never find it, except in my failing memory.

I'm going to make Monday mornings my Start of the Week report, where I plan what I'll commit to and deliver on the upcoming week. Just like work! Maybe I should do a Start of Month too, but let's learn to crawl before we run a Marathon.

Scene 002

Progress is being made slowly. But it is progress! I'm still not satisfied with the materials, as they're being applied. Let's do a proper evaluation, comparing what we've got with what we want. They think about what needs to be done to bridge the gap. The effort has felt too much about vibes and feelings. "Do I like this?" doesn't get you onto the next step.

We potentially have a new Environment Design lead. I should compile a list of questions to see if I can extract wisdom from the possible new team leader.

Aim: The material must be completed this week; in fact, dressing should be progressing, if not complete.

Side note: Gabe has been busy finishing an interior environment, so he hasn't produced his "challenge" terrain using Gaea. I eagerly await his challenge!

Superhivemarket Trades

I need to start making money on the Superhivemarket Store. The website I set up is going to cost me another lump sum shortly. It will cost much more than I earned from the product I created. I need to make way more products!

Things I can make:

Terrains: This time, I'd create actual baked scenes rather than just displacement maps. 

Space vehicles: I can make some cool ones. I think that one loosely based on Project Hail Mary would sell quite well. 

Planet: I can create giant planet maps. I could create a pack of 5-6 for £10

The aim this week is to develop a plan, not to rush into production. The aim should be to deliver something by the end of June.

Blender School

I think I need to start revising and push to complete more training on new things. I've forgotten most of what I learned about HardOps, although I think it would come back quickly.

I've not used Fluent or Random Flow in over a year. They're a mystery to me now. This is why writing down new procedures is so important to me; it serves as a quick memory aid, as opposed to redoing the work, which takes longer and often goes wrong. A case in point, though. The use of Render layers, which I thought I'd effectively recorded in a post, got me very stuck. I missed some critical element that seemed to reset asset visibility when shifting between layers.

Photography

I've had a small dip in productivity because I have been making use of the great weather, getting out and taking lots of photographs. So much so that I am glancing sideways at new cameras. <Slaps own wrist>

Loxley Valley from High Riggs

Blender School: Rendering shots using layers

 Blender supports the use of View Layers, in which a shot is rendered in multiple passes, with only selective elements sent to the render engine. Each layer renders with the background set to transparent, so that each layer can be recombined in the compositor.

Why use Render Layers?

Very large scenes quickly exhaust your system's resources, causing render times to be longer, and if an element needs to be redone, you have to render everything again. Using view layers, you do a shot in a number of separate renders. If one of the elements contains an error, you only need to re-render that individual element.

Is it hard to do?

Apparently, not. Let's see!

1.  Organise!

Ensure that the elements that you want to render in separate layers are organised into collections, as this makes it easier to mark which elements are visible in each view layer.

Important: Enable the Indirect Only flag in Outliner. For layers that generate emission, such as True-Sky, you will need the lighting from these elements to be sent to the render engine without the background elements, such as sky and clouds.

2. Create your View Layers

Render

Important: For the default combined view Render Layer "ViewLayer", go to its Layer panel and turn off Use for Rendering. If you don't, it will result in a render layer that you won't be using in the compositor. It's worth keeping, as you can use this view layer to make scene changes without affecting the other view layers.

Use for Render - turned off for the ViewLayer 

For an example landscape scene, I've broken the layers down as follows:

Sky - Clouds and Sky
Background - Most distant terrain elements
Midground - terrain between the distant background elements and the foreground
Foreground - The terrain at the front of the scene

The ordering indicates how the layers will be stacked in the compositor. If you get it wrong, you'll get very odd results, as elements that should be occluded will be visible—like background mountains appearing over the foreground elements.

Note that Render layer ordering isn't critical; it's how these layers are ordered in the compositor that counts.

In each of your layers, ensure:

• Only the collections you want to render are enabled.
• Go to Film in the render settings and enable Transparent. This ensures that no scene background is rendered in each layer, so anything behind them remains visible in the compositor.
• Ensure staging elements such as lighting, cameras, etc., are included in each layer. 

3. Set up the Compositor

a) Open the compositor and select View Nodes. This is automatic from Blender 5.0!

b) Create a Render Layer node for each of your render layers, select the layer name in the dropdown. This ensures that Blender includes each layer in the pipeline.

c) Create Alpha Over nodes to combine your layers, starting at the back (Sky layer, Background layer).
d) Create another Alpha Over node and combine the next set of two render layers.

e) Combine the outputs into another Alpha Over, get the ordering right so the back stuff goes into the background channel. Through this process, you should end up with an Alpha Over node that contains all scene layers; this will output to the Group Output and optionally, the Viewer.

All the layers together

When you render from the compositor, Blender renders each layer in order and builds the output according to your compositor node tree.

Viewed Separately:

Sky layer

Background Layer (White area is transparent space)

Midground

Foreground

All combined in the output

On the seventh day...

Take a rest from those terrains, already!

Yesterday I scratched that constant itch. I made me some landscape renders using World Creator and Blender with True Terrain 5.

Horrah!!! A giant terrain under True SKY 3, with a large Geo-Scatter-based scatter! In this case, the scatter is "fake" trees. Alpha scatter uses cards (flat planes) that align with the camera to produce the impression of a vast forest. It gives me confidence about ramping up scatters in scenes.

The next test will be with proper scatter objects, probably on a much smaller terrain.

The latest batch consists of 8x8km terrains. That's big enough for a city. It's the terrain size for a moderate mountain range, as you need about 4km for a mountain.

16x16k resolution gives you a 1GB EXR displacement file and a single mask weighing in at 100+ MB. These are unwieldy and probably too large for most users. You do get lovely detailing, though.

Today?

I need to answer the question of the aerial scene, but that will wait until tomorrow. So...

Shamrayev project: I need to pick it up and move it forward. We're still doing detail modelling, fixing and optimising. I am thinking of using MatPlus, which was just updated to 1.1 for the project. 

Blender School

I need to complete some training -- I'm far behind on this! 

 A new course, purchased on sale. It includes a massive amount of build, UV unwrapping and rigging footage. It has to be a bit less instructive and more like a follow-along YouTube video, but the end results speak for themselves - some very impressive elements! I'm sure I'll learn something.

I need to complete this course by Cov Philips. I was making good progress when I purchased it. 

I will need to start this course again as it's been gathering dust since May 2024. I stopped because I kept getting Blender crashes while following the first few lessons. Hopefully, this issue will no longer apply. HardOPs is still considered the "go to" workflow for serious (seriously sci-fi) hard surface modellers.


Cableator 1.6 is out! (Docs)

Cableator is such a good tool, but I've never fully understood its feature set. I need to read and watch a full run-through. I particularly want to see how the simulation aspect works. 

There's a really good tutorial from Blender Bros, although this is now three years old!