Orbital Elements: Medium Rig #5

 Last night I used Hitem3D's agent to build a proposed comms array dish. Oh boy, it is incredible that Hitem3D can create something as complex and intricate as a large high-gain antenna dish. Alas, it is just not quite precise enough. Many elements look "sludgy" and partially melted.                                                                                              

I changed the prompt to target a more compact antenna, based on a real-life example. It's better, but still too much yuck to compensate for the yum. Maybe I can build a simpler form manually to ensure the basic model is simple and solid.                                                             

The lesson here: The agent is amazing at building objects you have no good photo references for, as long as you can describe them. However, not every subject is well suited to a generative build. Really spindly and complex elements get sludgy. The same problem occurs on surface details.

For instance, this astronaut in an orange flight suit has super details on the folds, but the surface details such as pockets and the backpack are not as convincing -- it's like they scream "generative element".

Medium Rig update

This morning, I woke up feeling unhappy with the progress. I seriously considered restarting. However, after a few minutes of fiddling, I started to see how problem areas, such as the forward module could be rescued.

I got into the details a little too soon, but in my defence, I started with the large details already established. 

Stargard

For my tenth birthday, I got a set of weird but brilliant space warrior figures called the "Stargard" -- not to be confused with the city in Poland. They had bright yellow spacesuits and transparent-dome helmets. Retro cool! This morning, I took a break from terrain work to try recreating a few of the figures in Blender.

 I gave them off-the-shelf contemporary firearms because I couldn't remember what the originals carried. I think they were wrist-mounted sink plungers, which might explain why the entire toy range seemed to have been wiped out by Christmas that same year.

Blue plateau

Blue plateau at last,
the mountain no longer climbs,
Only the wind now tests me.

Terrain test and scene setup

Start of Week

Last week was another productivity slump (for Blender work). I completed three more iterations of the Service Road terrain test. I'm happy with the results, but I think I have a couple more cycles before I declare it ready for the next stage, more in the SOW. I made modest progress on Orbital Elements, but not much. Jeepers, what was I doing last week? Well, my brain has developed a bit of a fixation, and I'm trying to work through it. This week, more work, less endless rumination.

Raptor: Service Road update. I'll complete another iteration and add more detail to the edge of the road. It would be great to add some rock structures to provide flat rock projections in the right places. Some details might need to be added as bolt-on assets.

Other Raptor news: my Sparrow films Hoody should arrive very soon. Hurrah!

MSVC: I've done a lot of sketches. I think it's time I built a light rig using the new design rules.

I still like the idea of a fold-out MFI Ring. This week I will finalise a small-to-medium rig design for building.

Blender School idea

While working on the test scene above, it felt like time to stop relying on True Terrain 3, which has entered an era of very slow development as Richard and Zac juggle TrueVFX work with day jobs. This will mean learning the whole stack for terrain texturing so I can export a terrain, bake the materials, and then use Blender's default systems to finish the terrain. The one element I'm missing is the masking system in True Terrain, which broke in the last big update, as I've mentioned a few times. It makes realistic material masking difficult.

One option is to complete a terrain course; I have one in mind.
https://www.cgboost.com/courses/master-3d-environments-in-blender

I'll look into it more this week and decide over the weekend.

More figures

I realised that I'd not used Hitem3D for more than a week. Those credits won't spend themselves! I need to clarify when the credits need to be used by so I can make sure they don't go to waste.

Prince Albert (Sheffield city centre statue), A Division agent and a fashionable woman

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. 

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.

Marginal

 My watch reported that I had a fair night's sleep. Hip hip! Clara begins her first night shift, so I'll be taking the boys out this afternoon so she can do an afternoon sleep to prepare for working through the night.

A common activity on Sunday. Now that Leo is starting secondary school, I've committed to start ironing clothes again. School shirts on a Sunday evening sort of thing.

Casual Me

I'm so casual I'm cloned!

I'm burning through the month's Hitem3 credits, but I'm getting happy results.

The eyes, the eyes!!

When something is really good...but... imperfections can be jarring. Sabina's eyelashes are chunks of flesh. Oh girl, that is not a good look! I'll try to do a manual cleanup at some point. It's possible that heads and hands could be sourced from a more reliable workflow, possibly cut out from a human model generated by a dedicated generator app or addon. Faces and hands are usually the weak link. Some fabrics are too shiny or lack that surface quality, although I think this deficiency could be fixed with some shader and map editing.

HeightSmith (https://hs.xanathon.com/)

I was reminded of this excellent little web app for generating science-fiction-style height maps. It's super-configurable and flexible, although it's a shame about the apparent resolution limit.

Terrains!

It's been a while! I just had to load up World Creator and see if I could
remember the steps for cranking out a quick terrain. This one is 512x512m. I remembered that the latest version of True Terrain has a broken system for mask alignment, so I used Blender 4.x to set the terrain up with materials that use working masks. Sadly, loading this setup into the latest Blender didn't work as the materials tree was blank. Something changed, breaking forward compatibility. I ended up recreating the scene in Blender 5.2.1 and living without properly aligned material masks.

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.

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?

The calm before the storm

 I've returned to my part-time job, with shifts on alternate days until the start of the new term, when it will be Monday-to-Friday. What a shock! I've put on a bit of weight because I wasn't as active over the summer as I'd planned (and I was also eating too much of the wrong sort of food). I didn't maintain my resistance training due to a back injury, although I did keep up with the walking. If this morning's efforts tell me anything, it's that I will lose the weight when I start doing *that* every day. No bad thing!

I felt the need to dive into gaming for a few days. I'm not being very productive at the moment; I thought that maybe an actual gap would help -- a period of fallow before renewing my efforts on the animation project I installed XCOM 2. Oh boy! I love this game, although it's looking a bit dated now -- ten years old and still as engrossing and satisfying a turn-based strategy game as I've ever played.

Screenshot from 1st March 2016! I'd met my Waterloo, but I brought the whole team back, at least.

HitEm3D harder!

The super 3d model generator, HitEm3D, has a new super-detailed model. It's expensive to use but is currently being offered for free, presumably because nobody would try it otherwise, since it's three times the usual cost per model at the highest setting.

It's a brass bust of moi

Previous outputs pushed through the new V3 model

Added clouds/Atmosphere 2 addon ...seems stable

Stressy

 

What a strange creature is man, that he would choose to cage himself so willingly.
- Masamune Shirow (Appleseed)        

In a Dr Frankenstein move, I took my generative-AI head and placed it on some other generative AI-bodies. Cool, eh? <lightning strike>

Due to strike action, I am doing my work in the morning, so I can be back to see what damage the builders have caused. I am getting the skin-crawl feeling I experienced with dealing with conmen in the past. I will be watching them like a hawk. 

Friday

 By all accounts, it's going to be a hot one. A tease for summer? Possibly. 

Alien plants!

I get a warning email about having lots of unused credits on my Hitem3D account, so around the 20th of every month, I start hunting down quick, generic subjects for generative 3D models. Yesterday, it was finally time for some weird 3D plants. Usually, I make people.

Another week in which I was especially unfocused and distracted. It's been a fairly consistent state for a few months. There are reasons. The reason will hopefully pass in time.

Halo: Scene 002

I worked on terrain materials, but I ended up in a situation where each iteration was taking a stupid amount of time to render. The last render took nearly three hours. I need to par back the setup so that I can get faster renders. It's why I built the terrain in the above scene, as a test ground for quick terrain development. 

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