Service Road

 Although this work is technically under an NDA, I judge that a fog-obscured render can get a pass.

A tale of two terrain generators

 I've somehow fallen into a new workflow where I use both World Creator (WC) and Gaea to create a terrain. I use WC's ability to quickly build and sculpt a basic terrain from primitive landforms. I then import the heightmap into Gaea in order to use its superior node-based filter system.

Then I can take the Gaea output and import it back into WC to make more tweaks...and presumably ping-pong between the two applications until I'm in a happy place.

World Creator base terrain

Imported into Blender 

Into the Octoberverse

 Month ten, already! Wow!

Last week I kept thinking, developing, and sketching for Orbital Elements, so I don't have much to log in this blog. This week, I'll be back here catching up.

I like how close this design comes to the first OE space vehicle. Most big ships are built on a super-strong stem, made out of space elevator material, which has mind-blowingly high tensile and compressive strength.

I need to account for heat management - that MF ring generates a lot of thermal energy, so there needs to be a big radiator array or some novel heat sink system -- maybe huge tanks of salt.

Playing with the idea that smaller vehicles still need really big MF rings. Maybe they fold out/inflate, or they just don't appear in the vehicle sketch.

Blender time! Astronaut created using Hitem3D

Start of Week

Last week was all Orbital Elements. This week, I'll confine this work to my evenings out -- Mondays and Thursdays, when I walk with Noah to Army Cadets.

Halo: Raptor

Time to appraise where I am and what I need to do. Have I become fixated on the details and accuracy? I feel like I've been led to a task that is more open-ended and can easily become impractical. I need more Gaea expertise, but more importantly, I need to really understand how terrains are engineered. 

The service road's walls are very steep, and it seems they need to be enhanced manually after the terrain is converted to a regular mesh.

A practice service road-like terrain

OE Vehicle project

As a side project that works in both streams, I'll create a highly detailed OE vehicle to showcase the new design rules.

Proof-of-workflow test

whoopsy

 I fat-fingered the build of a new Gaea terrain for Halo: Raptor; instead of setting its resolution to 16k, I set it to 64k by mistake. The result was a very, very long build time, which exhausted my system's storage before it finished—about half a terabyte. I had to cancel and delete the cache files. Phew! Lucky I didn't corrupt my system.

I'll try again tomorrow. I feel like I just can't get the density right.

Concept sketches for MSVAs

Tyr's day

5.2.2 due

Today, another Blender update should drop: 5.2.2, which I imagine fixes any serious bugs uncovered since 5.2's release. I was surprised to learn that Blender 6 is entering Alpha. Blender 6!!!

Start of Week (missing from yesterday's post)

Halo: Raptor

I am still beavering away on the test version of the Gaea-generated service road area. This week I will work out a better strategy for adding lots and lots of undulations around the service road canyon. Right now, all my tests are too sparse and too flat. Getting more density might require a more procedural approach, rather than manually painting the terrain.

Modular Space Vehicle Asset Set (MSVAS)

Allow a couple of hours (this week) to plan the next steps. I think that the first thing I need is a design language for the space vehicles, which are part of my 2288A.D. Orbital Elements universe. Once I know what a 2288-era vehicle looks like, I can start planning how many engine pods, how many cargo pods—that sort of thing.

The big inspiration right now is the Project: Hail Mary space vehicle, which looks like a real thing, and yet looks cool. <I just grabbed a link to the original design by Paul Chadeisson, which was on his LinkedIn account, but found that my account has my old email address as primary. So I tried to change my primary to a working address, but got stuck in a loop trying to update it...>

Not this, but you get the idea

Blender School

I need to do more training/learning/practice. There are so many things I could or should be doing. So many that it's now impossible to choose what to do. Nature Generator? More rock sculpting? A newer addon that I've hardly touched or even forgotten about? Come up with a training timetable for the month, then jolly well stick to it.

Therapy

You guessed it. Terrains...endless, almost pointless, terrains

Workflow: World Creator --> Gaea --> Blender 

This is becoming a bit of an old chestnut—a bowl-shaped terrain you can plonk the camera in the centre and do a 360-degree pan without the terrain suddenly vanishing.

Wider (20mm)

They're not bad, but I really need to get the masks in True Terrain matching again. Maybe I should beg Richard to take a look at it when he has time?

Time-off, Time-out

 I'm resting a bit this weekend.

Watching TV

Clara and I started watching Apple TV's adaptation of Hugh Howey's Silo novels—which I haven't read. I wanted to watch it because it looks like it will help me with the development of my Orbital Elements project - research into living in archologies. It's a great show! By episode three, it reminds me of Lost: a mystery show that uses flashbacks to broaden its storytelling palette. Less so here, as the flashbacks stay within the confines of the Silo, while Lost had this amazing global setting. Rebecca Ferguson arrives late to her vehicle, only appearing in the final moments of episode one; how very West Wing.

By the end of episode three, it's clear that Ferguson's character is a fellow neurodivergent. It works! Ferguson has a knack for physicality—the nods, twitches, and sudden loss of constraint that could look manufactured—but it always feels authentic. It's the same acting superpower you see in play when you watch Barry Keoghan. I don't know where that level of physical coordination and control comes from. I get how a musician makes an instrument an extension of their body—lots and lots and lots of practice—but I don't understand how great actors can measure and learn to express themselves with such nuance. Magic, I guess, or lots of video cameras pointed at them while they rehearse.

TV 2026: Everything looks amazing because of clever creatives with computers

The Silo doesn't just have a great troupe of actors (whispers: so many British/European thespians!); it also has brilliant art direction, staging and craft. The place is fascinating and convincing. It reminds me of an essay I read about Utopias, and their limits. The Silo is a spatial utopia: a society can be an emergent quality of the living space, and if changing that space threatens to change the society, then such a utopia will fall to totalitarianism. Silo, right now, hides this fact behind rituals and a shared fear of those who would try to change...anything. 

Blending

Saturday morning's effort: create some strange statues for a future project using Hitem3D.

Hitem3D Marble Athena Statue

Shipping containers are a recurring subject for a quick modelling effort. The first one I built in SketchUp, when it was still Google's excellent free modeller.

Shipping container modelling. About 2-hours work

I'll be using it as the basis of an environmental design project, one day, week, month, year soon.

This morning

Before heading out for a walk, I created a base terrain in World Creator and imported its heightmap output into Gaea, creating a 1GB eroded bowl.

Imported into Blender/True Terrain 5.2

At a wider (25mm) focal length

A bit dark, eh

I'm still looking at ways to reduce True Sky's and True Terrain's combined habit of making terrains a bit sludgy, soft, and dark.

Whoosh. Another week flashes before my eyes

 It's flown! Here we are on Friday, seemingly moments after Monday's close. This might be the power of routine. Compared to the Summer break, everything runs on rails of routine, so you stop noticing the flow of time.

This week

Progress on the Halo terrain. I need to start a third iteration of the canyon/service road element. This time, I need to spend much longer filling in the land above the canyon with peaks and undulations. My main beef with the previous two attempts is that they don't include enough terrain detail.

Cheeky to show (NDA) but it's rejected, right? So it illustrates the lack of detail around the canyon.

Train travel

Clara and I took the train to Worksop because our broken-down car has been towed there for repair. We dropped off the service documentation at the garage and lugged most of our luggage back. While waiting for the train, I snapped photos of track maintenance engineers because their safety packs look really cool, maybe a bit Sci-fi.

Rough source!

It struck me that the figures would be a good test of Hitem3D. Exactly how usable would outputs from quite poor sources be? A test worth doing, I thought. I  wasn't expecting this to work at all -- look, his feet are essentially missing!

So that worked out pretty amazingly...

The first engineer with the best photo is the best by far, and I think it shows. That said, they are collectively very useful for background elements. I'm impressed! Also, a bit scared of what this does to the 3D industry. There's going to be a whole lot less work going forward. 

Fluent back in the house

The hard surface modelling tool, which wasn't initially working in Blender 5.2 looks to be fixed.

Quick test element: some tiny issues on the mesh, as usual.

Apparently, I bought this add-on in the opening weeks of the Ukraine invasion. Since then, I  have used it occasionally. Mostly, I get into a mess and need to learn how to make the most of the mesh/normal repair tools. Occasionally, it's done an amazing job.

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

Another mini-project

 Time for a weekend project! Get something finished; don't make it too elaborate or time-consuming. Get familiar once more with the feeling of having finished a project.

I will recreate or riff on a scene from Attack on Titan—a deeply political and philosophical science fiction/fantasy anime that I was introduced to by my eldest son.

screen captures

final season

Walking along a vast city wall, with great mountains and forests in the background.

First stab at the basics.

1. I created a rough mountain layout in World Creator.

2. I took the heightmap from World Creator and imported it into Gaea 2.

3. I used Gaea's node system to create a satisfying mountain terrain.

4. In Blender, I used True Terrain 3 to instantiate the Gaea mountain range into a terrain mesh.

5. Wall modelled using a simple block repeated with an array modifier.

6. Imported a model of me for scale. In the final piece, I hope to use a model of my Son.

That was about an hour's work. More tomorrow!

Wild Geese

 

A honking double-wedge of geese just flew over the house. The cacophony jolted me away from my coffee and reminded me that it's the first day back at school for both boys.

I'm going to miss the peace and quiet.

Things got busy here. Returning to work as the boys return to school. Leo, in fact, is starting secondary school. I made a few more figures; I did some piddling around with terrains. I discovered that Gaea had stopped working. It would refuse to export terrains, complaining about a lack of an appropriate license. As I suspected, installing the early-access version had overwritten my licence file. Quadspinner were very not upfront about the severe limitations on v3. It looks great, but if I can't export terrains, then it's no actual use to me. Roll on November, when I believe we'll see a full (working) release.

I did some test terrains using World Creator. I had tested the Blender Bridge, which lets you push a scene that you're building in World Creator straight into Blender. The tool works better than ever, but not well enough, alas. When I created a large, high-res terrain, I started getting out-of-memory errors in Blender. An issue that doesn't happen when the terrain is exported as an EXR and loaded into Blender via True Terrain 5.

Big terrain exported using the tried-and-tested EXR import method

True Sky version

Interesting results from Gaea testing, once my v2 license file was reapplied. You have to love those complex filters -- the one here that creates broken chunks. The debris is too fine, though. It's a liability unless you were able to render the terrain with 200 million+ polygons.

Gaea 2. working again! 120 million polygon version (in True Terrain 5.2)

Same terrain rendered as above at 1 million polygons (in True Terrain 5.2)

Original Gaea terrain

More figures

Leo photo converted. Leo has also suffered from that weird fleshy eyelash-extrusion problem. I cleaned them up in Blender, mostly.  

babylon.js has replaced the default Windows 3d object viewer. It's really good!

Happy Saturn's day in late Sextilis

 I don't want to develop a reputation as a moany old grumbler who complains a lot, but I've been awake since 4am. I've long passed safe drinking limits for coffee, and I'm dealing with back pain, mouth pain, slight ear pain and sore legs. The last two of those issues are listed for completeness, but they aren't causing me any measurable bother.

So I finished my playthrough of XCOM 2. I'm now very interested in getting that new Star Wars game that apparently offers the same crunchy turn-based tactics. Off in the distance, there's the promise of a Rainbow Six variant.

    "Looks like turn-based tactical games are back on the menu, boys!!"

I need to make some progress with the terrain test. I had a quick play with Gaea 3. It looks amazing, but the early access version they just released is resolution-limited and doesn't appear to support exporting terrains out. A bit of a non-starter for the moment.

Nauts

Created to support the development of Orbital Elements-based 3D content. These three "nauts" are now part of my drop-in characters' set.

1million+, 100k+, and 10k+ polygone counts.

Fun, fun, fun!

I can see me generating a few more in more varied poses in due course. I think I'd knock out a quick science fiction scene with them. I always wanted some decent spacewalk-ready astronauts.

Rock it! 2

Lots of talk of making some custom rocks. I suddenly remember how good Rock it! 2 was. Does it work with Blender 5.2? Well, as of very recently, yes, it does.

Geo-nodes-based rock creation tool. 

Rock it! 2, Aquatiq, and a basic volume ftw!

Onwards towards (long) weekend

Monday is a bank holiday 

Gaea 3.0 teaser video

Aquatiq

I bought an addon! Shopping therapy saves the day! Aquatiq comes from Blender add-on powerhouse Polygoniq, the creators of many mainstay addons, such as Materialiq and Botaniq. 

I'll do some testing soon! Really, this is a collection of really nice water shaders that you can drop into a scene. I have water in True Terrain, which is really powerful, but not really set up for use in small pools and limited areas. There are some shaders available in the Sanctus Library which can be nice, too. Aquatic also provides drop-in fountains and animated spray "legos" that simulate water flow, not to be confused with complex water-simulation tools like Flipfluids. There's a nice preview from CG Essentials.

Aquatiq waters

There's all the parameters you would need for fine-tuning your water. This is what makes products like this worth the investment; it's not a silver bullet for water rendering, it's a toolset from which you can fashion whatever ammunition your current project needs.

Back to work, again

 Halo: Raptor

The director reminded me of a test I said that I'd run, using Gaea to rebuild the terrain element for the service road. It should be possible; the question will be how to do it for the quickest and best results. I must confess, I've not touched Gaea since my rush to proficiency. I'm also hoping that we see Gaea 3.0 appear in the next few weeks. I'll have this test completed by the end of the week.

More Hitem3D

The daily free credits have stopped, but I've continued to generate content using Hitem3D. I took one of my heads and placed it on one of the bodies I'd created in last week's free-credits splurge.

V3 and V2.1 What a difference! Twice the resolution now, apparently.

I also started to create an asset library for the latest high-resolution figures.

I used decimation to create three variants of each figure: at 10k+, 500k+, and 1M+ resolution.

The men! I'll add the women once I've generated a couple more.

While there's a super improvement in the overall resolution, there also seems to be better accuracy. Hands are less prone to weirdness. This could be an issue with using generative AI source images vs high-resolution photographs of real people. There's room for improvement, but we're really only a year into this particular implementation. Where will we be in 5 years? Photorealistic (or near enough) output, maybe?