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

A point of inflection

 Halo: Raptor

The news of Microsoft's closure of Halo Studio and its transfer of the IP to Activision has, unsurprisingly, plunged the project into fear and uncertainty. I think Raptor will likely continue, with an adjusted aim point, since Microsoft can no longer provide a path to a web series production. I might even prefer a worse scenario, where they develop a whole new IP. Clearly, Halo has a huge following, and anything Halo automatically generates interest. This automatic interest comes at the cost of creative shackles; you're very constrained in what is a pretty derivative (Aliens blended with golden-age sci-fi) universe. A fresh start could open so many interesting new doorways, without significantly changing the story we intend to tell.

We will see!

I'll keep punching out iterations of the service road terrain, although I am struggling to get the fine detail I crave. I'll keep trying different approaches.

WC-Gaea-Blender workflow practice. Something quirky happened...

Reduced displacement looks better, but it isn't what I was aiming for.

MSVAs

I'm enjoying the concept creation phase of the work. Sketching and thinking, usually fueled by coffee and occasionally cake. The Modular Space Vehicle Assets line is tied directly to the Orbital Elements (OE) universe. Killing two birds with one stone, if you will. This means that OE provides design constraints, while the Blender modelling end provides OE with some ship designs, if not a ship kitbashing system.

A mid-sized space ship vehicle (In OE, we don't call them ships)

I still need to take a decent of Noah to use with Hitem3D for his Attack on Titan commemorative render.

A Blender sketch I made while trying to persuade my 11-year-old that it was bedtime. 

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?

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.

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?

Start of Week

 Here we are, burning through the summer holidays. It feels like we're only just starting, when in fact we are more than halfway through. Time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. 

Last week's progress: I get a pass! I was on holiday in Europe. This week will come with high expectations. Fully rested and raring to go? Well, maybe.

Aims

Halo: Raptor

New instructions from the new Environmental art lead. I'm to return to the opening planet scene and redo it following a different artistic vision. Marvellous! Who doesn't like throwing away two months of work? Well, this is the job; it's how it works. If you are too precious about work product, you are probably not cut out for commercial film/content production. That said, the fact that they didn't think that I "knocked it out of the park" with the last run-through is not a great sign. The new directions give me concern; they are driven by a series of Midjourney frames that, in my humble opinion, are overcooked -- like much of Midjourney's output. They are eye-poppingly attractive, but it just looks like gloss over substance: a striking image that doesn't support looking too closely at the details.

Training

Where to start? So much to cover. I feel like I need revision on everything, but I need to start somewhere. I'll draw up a priority list. It could be that I focus on environmental design because of the project, although I would like to get back to basics for some stuff. 

I have a ton of addons that I have not yet touched. I need to install them, read up on use and give them some practice.

I need to build a good camera rig. Souternshotty does a great tutorial on his setup. I will follow that again.

Physical Addons has their Atmosphere 2. It looks like a shameless copy of TrueVFX's True Sky3. I don't make such comments lightly, but given that Atmosphere 2 includes an Earth model that supports planetary atmospheres, rather than making that functionality part of their PCO: Planets addon, seems rather twisted. All said, I will be picking up a copy after the current sale -- which seems weird but its because the sale offers a small discount, but I can get a big discount as an owner of their first version, only during Superhive sales; you can't choose the bigger discount, it's the sale discount or nothing, until the end of the sale.

Sell something!

I'm looking at putting a package of scanned objects together and selling them really cheap. Rocks, mostly. I need to process the scans:

1. Make the objects watertight -- most need a bottom.
2. Extract the texture maps from the object and store them in a consistent file structure.
3. Turn them into assets and create an asset library. I may need to read up on the best way to do this so that when shared it works as expected.

Plan B will be a series of planet maps, created from an improved workflow that comes out of next week's Halo project work.

It seems like the new lead thinks my textures were not crisp enough. That was feedback on my 32k x 16k master file!! Planets are really big; when you start getting close in, you need monster-sized files. I'm already using files that are an order of magnitude larger than most of the production team because I have a workstation-class machine to work on.

I see pixelation! More resolution!!!

I see a 21k x 10k planet map. Oh, that's pretty big. Smaller filesize!!!

Raptor - quick request

 Gabe asked me to help make scale adjustments to the previs version of a starship's bridge. Not a lot of creativity, but a good exercise. It was clear that the source model was exported from either a game engine or had at least been optimised into a triangle-based model. A horrible starting point if you want to make edits! It took a couple of hours to cut the model in half, then turn it back into quads for adjustment, then separate so that some parts could be turned hidden.

The director approved the changes but requested adjustments to some railings because there needed to be more space for characters to move around a command table. Then, while I went on my holiday, Gabe remodelled the command table a bit.

The NDA prevents me from showing anything off, but it should be pretty cool.

End of Term

 It's the final week. My final day is next Monday, but the boys will end their school year at lunchtime on Friday. 

My sister, Tracy and her youngest child have been visiting, so I've mostly put down tools and spent time with them. They're off to spend some time in the Peak District, so I will be catching up over the week.

High Bradfield on Sunday

Start of Week

Last week was not very productive. No progress made on Halo: Raptor. There was a warning from the director that we needed to create some quick-turnaround previs environments to meet the needs of mocap capture that will be happening soon. I've not received any new work requests yet. I'll soldier on with the shot002 work.

Personal project

Monorail system. Quick and fun. Happy with the results, so far. I need to finish the rail system and build a cab.

On a whim, I decided that the cab would be more sci-fi than on Chiba's actual monorail system.

Blender 5.2

The shenanigans with crashing to the desktop after installing a bunch of add-ons really threw me off my stride. I have held back on installing any more addons. I'll possibly wait until tomorrow's official release, with a final batch of bug fixes, before having another go.

Onwards into Quintilus (or Septimus)

 Harsh week. Back pain. Chronic sleep deprivation. Stresses and strains. We endure!

Diabetes

I'm off the medication, handling my insulin resistance through diet and exercise alone! Yay! Now to stay on the straight and narrow, so that my next HbA1c test continues to show me below the pre-diabetes range.

Halo: Raptor

I chatted with the director about my progress with Gaea. We're looking at using Gaea for my next scene. In the meantime, I will be doing some quick test terrains to see if I can muster the right type and quality.

I also need to finish the city. For this, I need to grab the terrain beneath the city and create a copy of its topology so I can properly map the roads onto it. Currently, much of the city's surface level is sunk below the hills.

Now, let's see if I can break out of my disconbobulation and get some productivity.

Time to get back to work

 

I feel like I have put one foot through the doorway into the Gaea terrain creation. Its node-based system and impressive selection of erosion systems make it a preferred choice for complex terrain. Not in every single case, but in general.

Spot art for a Facebook group I belong to:

True Sky 3 and some old models

Start of Week 

Last week's aims:
Complete Gabe's challenge - tick! I conceded and moved on to the next aim: learn Gaea. That's another tick! Also, refresh my Random Flow skills. Tick!

This week

• Re-engage with the Halo: Raptor scene 002 work. There's a conversation happening with the env team.
• Take another look at Random Flow -- there's a new major release out. I'd better get it installed and take a look.
• I desperately need to complete a small project. A fully-fledged but simple-ish scene.

City build

 Scene 002

I'm taking a break from the terrain materials. Yesterday I took Gabe's previs depot model and shrank it down into something I could place into the scene. It definitely works better than my rushed lash-up. I may need better materials.

Next, I started to build out the city on the island/coastline. Creating a low-poly city that has enough detail to be sold as a real place requires quite a lot of mesh noodling. While slowly setting up a base mesh, I was aware of how well Blender Guppy's Random Flow would handle mid-level details. 

I haven't used Random Flow for a while, and I've forgotten the finer details of its procedural system. I should watch the recent beginner's video about it.

True Terrain Material Testing

Looking at the pre-built material, which I intend to do a breakdown for:

True Terrain 5.2

 

I spent a lot of time on the terrain in scene 002. Not much to show for it because render times are fairly long. I hope to add a couple more layers to the materials without causing the blackout problem, which is reportedly being fixed in Blender 5.2/True Terrain 5.2. 

A snippet of Scene 002

I check that this is true, and discover that True Terrain 5.2 is OUT! What the heck!?!

<a few minutes later>

True-Terrain 5.2 installed okay. I did a render test. Okay. I created a new scene and got carried away with the polygon count, probably 200 million polygons. Hard crash with a system reset. <glum>

It seems stable when I don't get carried away, although new scenes appear to present a bug when using masks. 

The mask should match the displacement, but by default, it is offset. I raised a bug on True-VFX's GitHub.

Scene 002

Maximal effort today and the weekend to push the scene forward. I will see if I can add a coastline and maybe some mountain tips, with darker rock and snow.

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

Must.Crack.On

 I'm neither enjoying the Scene 002 materials nor making any notable progress on them. I'm finding myself jumping on housework and chores rather than face another iteration. This needs to end today. I need to move into the assets and dressing stage, pronto.

It's shared on Patreon! I'd better finish it then!

Housekeeping

On that score, I note that my Blender directory has reached 656GB (28,000 files in 1384 folders). There must be a ton of duplication and backup files. Today I will permit myself to do a careful and rather late spring-clean.

Edit: Deleting some add-on install files and all the backup Blend1 files reduced the directory to 529GB (25,000 files in 1313 directories).

Meet up

 An esteemed work colleague/manager/mentor is visiting the UK with his wife. They're visiting Sheffield for a day, so I'm going to catch up with them today or tomorrow, possibly both if it means reconnecting with a few ex-colleagues.

It's going to be nice/a bit weird/possibly emotional to catch up with people after three years. Especially having spent the intervening time in a bit of a self-care bubble. We will see! I will report!

Edit: It was too short notice for other ex-WANdisco people to make the date; it was just the visitors and me.

Splashdown

Subnautica 2 has entered early access. I have purchased. I have played. About four hours, so far. It's quite smashing! So far, it seems to have everything I loved about the first game and its stand-alone expansion, only a bit better. Obviously, I will only be dipping in as a reward for completing work tasks—the Scene 002 terrain is now very late. That should be a priority!

Scene 002

Firstly, I had to do some repair work. The critical lake area disappeared. Looking into the problem, I realised that the lake EXR file wasn't loading in because I'd renamed the directory it was stored in. Once that was identified, the lake was quickly returned, and I could concentrate on adding a final set of hills.

The next step will be to rebuild the scene in Blender using new displacement plates and mask files. Once done, it's "dressing-up" time, with the addition of some foliage scattered in the foreground and a lot of structures, here and there; for starters, the city. 

This week

I haven't fallen too far behind on the project effort, but I need to get more productive so that a small slip doesn't get any worse. I've missed my targets for Blender School - that will be a second item on the list.

Gaea vs World Creator

The challenge I posed to Gabe: create a terrain in Gaea, and I will attempt to match it with World Creator, has not yet started. We'll see if Gabe delivers the challenge. I did have a bit of practice, creating a flow terrain in about forty minutes.

Same terrain with a much gentler elevation. Note the path-based material layer that follows the flow, turning it into a stony path or river-bed.

Positive feedback

<sings> Positive Feedback!

Doesn't it just make the world go round?

I posted shots of the latest iteration of the Scene 002 terrain. The director loves it. I just need to add a few more hills to the last flat-looking area. This area was flat by design because ...variation is important. But directors make the big bucks for a reason. More hills!

There remain big challenges. Getting the materials right and consistent with the other scenes will take a lot of time. It's iterative, but the render times on each test are a few minutes, which is very sub-optimal. I think this is a major problem with my general 3D workflow; I get bogged down in slow renders too soon. It should be really fast. Maybe I should be working without True Sky 3 until it's all finished?

Lead Env Artist Gabe seems unhappy that I'm using World Creator instead of Gaea. He's looking at World Creator, but it isn't working for him. I really need to produce more work with Gaea to better understand where each tool's strengths lie. I've suggested to Gabe that he produce something in Gaea and I will try to replicate it using World Creator. We'll see if this is the nudge that I need to spend substantial time retraining with Gaea. On this, I rechecked my upgrade to Gaea 3.0, which doesn't appear to have worked, so I've messaged Quadspinner to take a look.

Random render of old. A World Creator Terrain completely lost under grass and cliff assets. A lesson about how your terrain is only a part of a scene. Sometimes not as big a part as you imagined.

Technically, this is a breach of the NDA, except the entire terrain's shader broke, leaving only a hint of what's going on.

New Car

I didn't get much Blender time over the weekend because Clara wanted help in getting a new car. This was the first time I had a significant part to play in the process. My first time dealing with car salesmen. Sheesh, their reputation appears to be well earned!! We chose a 3-year-old KIA Sportage, which we are picking up today.

Halo: Infinite terrain labours.

The director asked for an update. I find myself caught in a cycle of progress, only to fall short of the necessary level, forcing a restart. Gabe, the lead environmental artist, has been called in, but he's seemingly never actually used True Terrain, so he hasn't yet provided a winning insight into how to make progress. He likes Gaea. I like Gaea too, but I also recognise that just because Gaea has superior erosion systems doesn't automatically make it the better tool for the task.

Nonetheless, I really should do some more Gaea lessons, or I'm the stick-in-the-mud, here.

This week's tasks

Same as last week!

Get Scene 002 finished, which means:

1. More hills in the flat areas. 

2. Win at terrain materials.

3. Find a way to introduce foliage that doesn't crash my system...<hint> It will probably be done in the shader system rather than as discrete scatters. 

Blender School

Some serious lessons, even if it's refreshing my knowledge. I found myself doing Boolean modelling without touching Hard Ops. Insane, but that's what happens if you don't practice stuff: it gets dusty, then rusty, and then you lose it.

 

Material test at high altitude.