The Great Blender Refresh -- Nearly there!

Things got busy at the end of the week. I did some messing around in Blender, but nothing useful or serious. Most addons were installed successfully, with some noted critical exceptions. Those exceptions are getting sorted quickly:

Geo-scatter has been updated for Blender 5.2, and the early testing is positive.

Flower Power - Geo-Scatter 5.6.4 for Blender 5.2

True Terrain 5.2 -- Richard has confirmed via email that an installation issue has been identified and a fix is coming soon.

In the days and weeks after a release, add-ons often see updates. I believe some addons I installed and declared working have received updates, possibly due to edge-case issues that didn't affect my quick test.

Can't say fairer than that. Honestly, I totally understand why you would wait until release day to review and fix issues, though it makes sense to be aware of when a new release will cause a break during the release candidate week.

Storm Chandra

 My pre-dawn hours of undisturbed work were interrupted by the early appearance of the rest of the family. Apparently, the weather woke them. They need louder music and better headphones! The weather is seriously rough this morning. Rough enough to earn a name: Storm Chandra. Wild winds and raucous rain. 

Today

Sparrow Films/Raptor

I'll use yesterday's learnings about UDIMs to set up a new planet scene and see if I can incorporate a set of UDIM texture sets into the procedural planet setup I've been using. I'll assign two hours to this task. If that's done sooner, I'll make a start on the new high-resolution texture maps.

Hard Ops

An hour or so of practice, as I'm losing the memories of some of the functions. I searched yesterday for a "recut" function, which isn't called that. I was thinking of 

Terrains

"Why of course, please continue your obsession with creating terrain meshes." In my defence, there's a new version of World Creator out. I tested it last night and possibly found a bug in its 2D Stamp implementation: high-bit-depth height maps get squished on load, producing ugly stepping. I tested my scene in the previous version, and the problem doesn't occur.

2026.1 has stepped terrain from a 2D Stamp

2025.6 with the same file loaded

Let's see if the team at Bite the Bytes agree with me.

Here's the terrain in Blender, without those steps.

Terrains!!! <in the voice of a zombie groaning "brains">

My drop-in figures are looking into True SKY 3's atmospherics

Testing Geo-Scatter. Great, no problems, yet

Hard Ops Tutorial

 I've now moved on to the section of the course that runs through a modelling exercise. I watched keenly, but I didn't like the model they were building. I thought that instead, I would watch the videos, then build something else using the same Hard Ops functions.

I'll build a space vehicle's crew console, based on modern jet fighter ejector seats. Starting with this:

I'll concede that the Blender Bros ship will look a lot better when completed, but in the early stages, it's a bit "Silly-Sci-Fi."

Sketch from this morning:

Geo-Scatter on the cards (Alpha Tree only has flat planes (cards), not real geometry trees.

Crashes and render failures

 I've been unable to render any Geoscatter-based scenes that use TrueSKY 3. I get the following error all the time:

what is an ERROR Illegal address in CUDA queue copy_from_device (integrator_intersect_shadow integrator_queued_shadow_paths_array)

The AI search tells us is

"a technical error message primarily encountered during GPU rendering in Blender's Cycles render engine. It indicates that the graphics card encountered an invalid memory address while transferring data back from the GPU to the system memory (or within GPU memory), which usually points to a bug in the rendering calculations or an unstable system.

The (integrator_intersect_shadow integrator_queued_shadow_paths_array) portion of the message specifies the exact function within the Cycles source code where the error occurred, often related to ray tracing and shadow path calculations."

Potential Causes and Solutions

The error can stem from scene-specific issues, software configuration, or hardware instability. Common fixes include:

Scene Issues (Ray Calculations):
Limit ray travel: The error often happens if a ray of light "travels to infinity" outside the scene boundaries, causing numerical instability or invalid memory indexing.

A common workaround is to place the entire scene inside a large bounding box (like a cube) to contain all light paths.

Check complex shaders/geometry: Specific elements, such as volumes, complex materials (like Principled BSDF with Adaptive Subdivision), or the Vector Displacement node causing NaN (Not a Number) values, can trigger this crash.

Simplify the scene: The issue might be related to running out of GPU memory (VRAM), which can manifest as an "illegal address" error rather than a clear "out of memory" message.

Try reducing texture resolutions or simplifying geometry.

Software and Driver Configuration:Update/Reinstall Drivers:

Ensure you have the latest stable NVIDIA Studio Drivers installed. A clean installation of the drivers after completely uninstalling the old ones can resolve issues caused by corrupted installs or Windows updates.

Use OptiX instead of CUDA: In Blender's preferences (Edit > Preferences > System > Cycles Render Devices), try selecting OptiX instead of CUDA (or vice versa) if your GPU supports it. Using both simultaneously can cause conflicts.

Disable Open Shading Language (OSL): Turning off OSL in the Render settings has been a fix for some users experiencing this specific error.Hardware and System Stability:

Check GPU Overclocking: Any GPU overclocking (e.g., via MSI Afterburner, Dragon Centre) can make the render process unstable. Disable overclocks and run your GPU at stock speeds.

Monitor GPU usage/memory: Avoid running other GPU-intensive applications (like games or browser tabs) while rendering, as this can cause resource conflicts or run you out of memory.


There have been Python crashes too, and warnings about Maximum Number of Closures Exceeded"

The warning "WARNING Maximum number of closures exceeded: 96 > 64" in Blender's Cycles render engine indicates that a material in your scene is too complex to be compiled by the rendering kernel (usually the GPU). The number 64 is a hard-coded internal limit on the number of shader "closures" (functions or components) that a single material can use simultaneously. Your scene is attempting to use 96.

This is a common limitation when using highly complex or nested shader node groups, especially with the Principled BSDF shader or when using Open Shading Language (OSL).

Geo-Scatter Lessons

 Geo-Scatter is Blender's top asset scattering tool. It's got more power and flexibility than the one built into True Terrain 5, which is very good in its own right.

There have been issues with Geo-Scatter recently. Assets that I scatter now seem slightly offset from the terrain. This could actually be a True Terrain issue. I'm looking into it.

There are a lot of powerful Geo-Scatter features that I don't use because I never bothered to learn how. Today, I start to fill in some of the most important knowledge gaps.

No weight painting scatters with TT5

This is a really useful scattering method, but sadly, it isn't available in True Terrain 5 because the terrain isn't "baked" geometry; it's a geometry node output. Using TT5's scatter system, you can paint an attribute mask.

Affinty

Scatter systems are sometimes influenced by other scatter systems. The Affinity system will tie the scatter to another target system so that they scatter close to the target scatters, based on a minimum distance of influence.

Minimal affinity to sphere scatter system

Satisfying fragmentation

Use a noise-based feature mask for more control.

Repulsion

This is the reverse of Affinity. Use it to set a rule for minimum separation between the scatters and a target scatter system. 

I may look at creating some custom biomes.

Rocky terrain

 I created yet another terrain, then dressed it with rocky scatters.

I realised that I'm not using some core functions of Geo-Scatter. I should do a Blender School episode on some key features I never bothered to learn how to use. 

Crashes

Let's take a look at Windows Event Viewer.

This crash that just happened:

A TDR has been detected. The application must close. Error code: 7 (pid=14120 tid=23200 blender.exe 64bit) Visit http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3633 for more information.

About yesterday...

 What. The. Hell. 

The problem with Geo-Scatter had come back. Scatters were elevated above the terrain height. It wasn't because of misplaced object origins or other transformation malarky.

 I did some basic fault checking. I'd installed Blender 4.32 and True Terrain 5 and was planning to test Geo-Scatter there. However, after doing a quick terrain render, I found my PC flashing red—FLASH RED from within. It's a function of the Corsair ICUE system that uses RGB lighting for various effects. This wasn't decorative, and it threw me into a panic. I stopped Blender and checked the system monitor. I could see 100 degrees on the CPU. Well, SHEEEET.

I closed Blender, and after a few minutes of feeling glum, I realised that after installing Blender 4.32, I'd missed the step to switch over to GPU rendering, so I'd been running Blender on the CPU. Still, it's a very poor showing that I got the CPU overheating just by rendering. It could be worse, I guess. All things being equal, it isn't really a fault; it is just a reminder that you need to use the GPU.

The Geo-Scatter fault might either not be a fault or is fixed. I'm still testing.

Terrain therapy

Creating terrains makes me feel better.

I did a quick animation of the same scene.

Next.

I need to make some money, so I need to make some models or assets. Maybe I will go back and start another vehicle, finally fix up one of my space vehicles, or start something new. First, a terrain scene.

Quirk-o-clock

 Hmm...

I took a break from the rig to play with True-Terrain 5. 

Some stuff has gone weird. I've already experienced real problems selecting objects. Geo-Scatter doesn't work correctly for some scatter types, at least on True-Terrain 5 terrains.

Three terrains

I started to place scatters on the foreground terrain, but nothing worked unless I used a manual or quick scatter. 

I created a terrain manually and tried to scatter. It worked. I tested on both the old and new systems. Curiously, the first render showed a huge difference in render time. Later renders didn't show this difference.

Athena 9:42

 Vulcan 4:50

I'll be looking into this more closely, though this afternoon I'll be completing the build of the Medium Rig