Women

Here are some of the woman figures I've generated, which I'm adding to a new portion of the Character Set 1 asset library.

Update with the director

 I caught up with the director of Halo: Raptors last night. It went really well. He loves the latest samples. I have a list of tweaks that he wants me to make. It's all good, sensible stuff. I need to do some more element sculpting; for instance, the service road, which was hinted at in the latest terrain, needs to be more accurate and detailed.  

I need to get another update completed before the end of the week, or I'll lose my momentum again.

Hi3D updated to  V2.1 

V2 - V2.1 

There are so many incremental improvements that 2.1 really feels like a serious elevation in the generative 3D space. It's still my go-to for background models/ instant-fix stuff.

Portrait Mode!

Sketch "Before the duel"

Samurai Stormtroopers!

Terrains are treading water

 Yesterday, I ran out of steam. The test renders introduced volumes, and suddenly, every render was taking a long time. I was sitting, looking for distractions while renders happened in my presence.

The ship model was appended from a shared project file. It's pretty nice for a low-poly representation. However, it was linked to animation frames, so that it rendered in a completely different location from where it sat in the viewport. Very strange!

Monster terrain. 64km wide. The reference block is 1000m high

The volumes are underlit and too blocky, but they do the job of selling scale.


Terrains

8k masks look pixelated up close

You get much better masks when you have a 1GB terrain. Go figure!?!

Added effects from True SKY 3 and Photographer 5

Bits and pisces

 Firstly, more crashes. It could be that I've slowly developed unrealistic expectations about the size of terrains that I render. Rendering terrains with 50+ million faces would have been bonkers not a long time ago. Although it's possible to render these massive terrains with Camera culling, when you add True SKY 3 and scatters to the mix, I'm likely experiencing memory exhaustion.

Release 5.0.1 

Expected today. Lots of bug fixes are incoming. Hopefully!

Marker style renders

One of the best near-future concept artists, Maciej Rebisz, has released his Blender Compositor group for turning Blender into a big pack of marker pens. Download it from Gumroad.

This makes my ships look more like Ian Stead's excellent stuff.

So good, you can smell the pen solvents!

Hitem 3D

I've now nearly exhausted my first trial month's allowance on the generative 3D tool Hitem3D. Will I continue to use the service? For one more month, maybe.

You get three free respins for each output.

There is no denying that a generative tool has its uses. How hard/long would it take to retopologise and fix one of the better characters it provided? I think the best outputs come from good photographs rather than Midjourney.

Sparrow Films work

I keep trying to produce the Sci-Fi mountains backdrop that Drew has asked for. I'm not quite there yet, but since I love creating terrains, it's not a big imposition, though it keeps me from making progress on my Shamrayev personal project.

Not what I need, but quite nice terrain patterns

Typical weekend

 Was it a lazy weekend? Well, I didn't do very much. Battlefield 6 was offering double-XP, so it made sense to mindlessly waste all my time on that. But not all my time, really. I actually did some cool things.

I did a lot of scatter practice, as I want to do a really good job on the Blender 5.0 celebration render.

New terrain. Lots and lots of new terrains

Tres dark out there.  It's hard to see the biome test.

I played with GeoScatter's biome system. Biomes are a collection of ground scatter recipes that carefully layer different ground assets to produce an instant environment type. They are too resource-hungry to use on anything other than a tiny area of foreground. 

Biomes in a pot

From now on, I'll use this smallish pot (it's enormous, for a pot, but very small as a terrain) to test complex scatter collections and own-grown biomes.

A dry grass terrain (my own scatter collection)

Arid (Bagapie biome collection)

Customised biome

Customised biome

Another terrain and some of those wonky generative AI assets

This element looks pretty cool. I will generate some complementary elements to form a full Lovecraftian alien temple.

This week

Blender 5.0 Release Candidate

This will set the clock for the full release in the following week, unless something stinky turns up while testing. I will migrate some of my own work to 5.0, although project work, such as the Service Road, must remain on 4.5 LTS.

True Sky 3

Oh boy, this looks absolutely amazing, especially with the added sky physics and support for planets.

Layered clouds and a "projected planetary sphere"

Service Road

Complete the requested changes to the service road elements. Probably a day's work all in all.

Celebration Render

Complete the modelling and texturing of the egg house. Select a terrain and start dressing it. I had trouble testing BagaRiver addon. I might look into it as it looks like a great way to add a nice stream. This might be handled by Nature Generator; I'll consider that, too.