Start of Week, Start of November

 Start Of Week

Last week I did some good work on terrain sculpting, pushing the Halo: Raptor work slightly forward. I need to continue with the work this week.

I also continued with the personal project/Orbital Elements vehicle/Commerical Product effort with the Medium Rig (hold on, didn't it begin as a light rig?). 

This week, I will focus on completing the Medium Rig. My worry is the CG artist's adage: Completing 90% of a design leaves about 90% of the work time remaining. Polishing and tweaking takes much longer than laying the foundations.

Last week, I completely failed to do any training. I look back over the last few weeks, maybe a few months and see a big motivation and creativity leak happening for ... reasons. I think that things have improved since the half-term break, but we'll need to see how this term pans out.

I have been a lot busier with busy work; more frequent grocery shopping, more food prep, more cooking, and more house chores. It's all good, except it has cost creative time.

November Plans

Along with weekly plans, let's try monthly plans (SOM). 

Halo: Raptor. Complete the Terrain effort so that by the end of this week I have a solid base mesh to tweak and polish. The aim has been to create a complete service road model that can be chopped up and turned into the individual scene elements. That suddenly sounds like a tall order!

Orbital Elements: I'm aiming to write an hour per day. I am just not managing that. I will not beat myself up about the failure. Thank you, Aimee McNee, for that advice!

I need to develop my terrain creation skills outside of True Terrain; it doesn't look like Richard or Zach can get much done on a new version. No fix seems to be coming soon. <wipes tears away> 
To do this, I will complete a hefty course and go back to complete or repeat courses I already have.

Clean up time

Next run: tidy up all the mid-level details. Next run: Tiny details.

Orbital Elements: Medium Rig, full steam ahead!

 It's only gone and become November. Crikey!

This morning I put more care into mashing the Shamrayev Engine section into the Canto. Note the inclusion of the engine section's forward assembly, beefing out the aft section of the Canto. Suddenly the MFI ring is back in its centre-line position. 

At this point, I think it's time to declare the overall form complete and start sweating the details.

Orbital Elements: Medium Rig Crit time

 It's time to get this Medium Rig finished. It's been crawling this week, but it needs to be whizzing toward the finish line; otherwise... well, you know what happens in ADHD land: abandonment sadness.

It's been a long time since I did a proper review of an ongoing design; here goes!

Crit it!

Overall, I like the general layout. Mike Ward, a much-respected illustration tutor, told us to do a squint test for things like a piece's composition. It can work on a design's overall shape. I like the silhouette; it's probably what this boils down to. 

I don't want to break that, but I need to make sure the surface details are more consistent. The recycled Heavy Rig docking section doesn't quite match up, so I'll make sure that the forward sections and the command section to its rear have the same style and scale of panelling.

I've used the orange superstructure frame to try to tie things together, but there are elements that are not in sympathy with the overall design. The wide orange band at the front is just a paint colour, not an indicator of a structural element.  Change the colour, maybe? If so, where else might paint panels break up flow and yet compliment the yellow structure?

The read of the command section and the propulsion sections will be details areas. Not nurnies! I want these details to be really specific and functional. The propulsion system looks like a jet engine, with piping and conformal components. The Command Sections details will be more like externally mounted systems and stores. Maybe some repair drones?}

The hab module should have a few windows. They'll help establish scale. Possibly an airlock here and there.

Find a way to connect the orange bracings/structural elements with the  central frame that supports the MFI ring.

The MFI needs to look like its made of small complex things -- forward field-induction panels. Cables from the central area connect to the inductor plates. At the rear are radiators.

The shield held me back. I looked at earlier rad shields and the only one that looks right is the one on the Shamrayev.

The Shamrayev is a larger vehicle. Maybe heavier than a rig. Design rules will be a bit different.

Although this design predates the introduction of the MFI ring, I can see how one could be slipped into the propulsion vanes -- suddenly these look like oversized radiators. Maybe I need bigger radiators. It's a thought!

Fly-past days, weeks and...whoosh, here goes October

 Raptor Progress

Slow but steady. All the terrain-sculpting fun has gone into developing the service road cliffs. I'm happy with the progress! 

Cliff section sculpt

This element is really big, about 16 million polygons. Really, this is a miracle of Blender 5, which always seems to laugh off polycounts, at least until it crashes. On the subject of crashing, I've been getting a lot, but all on the older machine. This could be CPU erosion, and I need to start limiting more cores. We'll keep an eye on that. I use the secondary (4090) machine for sculpting because it has my Wacom tablet attached and all my lovely rock-sculpting brushes installed.

Quick test on instancing

Take the giant terrain element and create instances, then arrange them into a big scene that doesn't swallow all your system memory thanks to instancing!

Camera view

Yes, you can see the repeated elements, but this is a test. In anger, you could add more clutter to help hide repeating patterns.

Other stuff

This felt a bit Blender-schooly, so I didn't do any additional training. I will at the weekend. I wanted to collect some notes on the recent phone-camera addon. It's time I created something worth showing.

Other other stuff

The Medium Rig started to gather dust, so I jumped back on it yesterday.

The model is in serious need of a clean-up, but I am holding off until I complete the first pass on all the elements. Later today, I will complete the propulsion section and add a comms array, possibly on some clusters attached to the MFI ring. Some of the details need improving. I really want to do a better-than-usual job of the materials.

Friday! with Orbital Elements: Medium Rig

 I broke up the command module with bolted-on Cabins. 

Reaction mass tanks are now caged.

But I was beginning to lose confidence in the design again. I wanted to see if a more conventional command module might make me feel better about it.

I put the command module from the first "Big Rig" onto the front. Interesting! It adds a nice rocket vibe and certainly makes a bit more sense.  

I might recreate the command module's basic form while changing some elements. I like the idea of a detachable module with its own independent propulsion system.

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. 

Orbital Elements: Medium Rig #4

Steady progress on the Medium Rig

Lots of medium details on the main hull and command module.

I thought it was time to try Hitem3D's new agent, which generates source images using ChatGPT. You'll note the cargo cans are now super detailed. Nice start! I created a couple of radar dishes, but they were a bit too detailed.

I'll complete the command module tomorrow.

Orbital Elements: Medium Rig #3

 Build time!

The Medium Rig, codenamed "Canto Brite", has now started.

Concept

The blockout I used to create printouts for doing the sketching (with perfect-ish ellipses)

The MFI ring's structural frame is almost complete.

Orbital Elements: Medium Rig #2

Where's the Blender work? This is a Blender blog!

That's coming; it's good I recognise it's too soon to start building because too many elements still aren't decided.

I decided that having the cargo cans arranged along the main axis isn't good if you want to treat them as a large floor space. I've turned them around and docked them onto the main hull. You can now have airlock access to the cans.

 Clara looked at this from the other side of our dining table and said: "That looks a bit phallic". True! erm. So I'm adding elements to break up the "head".

This is starting to make me question the solid central beam. Comms arrays and a big antenna. I want to go back to an open frame with stuff bolted on.

Okay, it's time. Next update, you'll see the block-out in Blender. There's still room for design changes, bit I'm happy with the general form.

Orbital Elements: Medium Rig

 The latest version of the Medium Rig space vehicle is still being sketched out. I don't want to start building until I have a solid, reasonably detailed drawing to work from. I think there have been times when a project has gone bad because I lost something in the translation from sketch to model, or the sketch didn't clearly describe what the 3D version would look like. I think the last attempt at the Medium Rig ticked both these boxes. 

Frame vs solid truss? Hmmm

Cargo pods on the truss are more visually interesting but would increase loading. Worth the cost?

Scene 000 Submitted!

 This morning, I shipped the planet scene for Raptor. I can't post finished images, but I can report that I spent about three hours cleaning artefacts from the maps. These mostly appeared in the height map. As a result of my tweaking the colour levels, grid lines from the source images appeared.

Tiny grid lines from satellite source imagery

It feels good to finally submit something! Let's see if changes are required...

Medium Rig progress

Slow progress is still progress. I added a support frame for the fuel tanks. It was too weedy, so I added a stronger-looking one. More on the engine-end of things, tomorrow.

I need to do practice on environment/terrain scenes. That could be something for the weekend. 

It's time for....prod--uct--iv-ity...

 After a weekend of bouncing around inside my own head, I begin the week with more clarity and focus. Let's scoop it all up and put it into this morning's work!

Weekend

I did nearly three hours of "rucking" -- that's walking with a heavy rucksack. I marched forcefully to the city centre and back, swaying occasionally, so I probably looked drunk when hoofing up the steeper hills. It was hard, but it felt good—then. Now, I am still a bit sore. Apparently, I'd packed twice the recommended 10% of my body weight payload -- some 16kg in all. It doesn't seem right to halve the payload for the next session. I'll see how I feel about it next week.

I didn't do much in the creative area. I finished some TV shows: Murderbot (great fun), Season 3 of Slow Horses (silly fun), and some Attack on Titan, with my son, Noah.

Planet "Cobolt"

I'm reasonably happy with the landmass/ocean mask, although there's room for improvement. I've started painting, cloning, and inpainting different biomes and will try to add more dramatic mountain ranges, which I'll need to source large Earth samples from somewhere.  This time, I'll look to make some colour tweaks to make it look a bit different.

This week

For Sparrow/Raptor, I need to deliver the Scene 000 planet scene once I have completed a tidy-up on the planet maps. I then need to sculpt the close-in area of the setting, adding a distinctive arrowhead-shaped lake to make the transition from orbital vp to aerial vp as clear as possible.

Then, apparently, I'm going back to the service road. I think it's all going to need redoing in a mightier and lower-poly mesh.

For personal Project work

Just finish something?!

Shamrayev has chilled to the point where it will take a lot of effort to get it back into production.

The medium rig, which finally received some acceptable progress on Friday. Some of the UVs are typically shonky, although it might not matter, as I'm unlikely to invest the time in learning to do a detailed custom texture using the new Matplus addon.

Scatter tests

It seems like True SKY 3/True-Terrain 5, and Geoscatter now play better together, although I was seeing an apparent bug with one of the scatter modes I use a lot (scatter to a bezier) that didn't seem to work. I need to put together more scenes with more carefully applied scatter systems to ensure everything works when needed.

A first step...floaty-same-tree 

That quick personal project

 I just couldn't get my head together over the weekend. The family also wanted me to host Minecraft, which is nice but not a great productivity move, unless you count dig-dig-dig-digging as being productive.

I think I'm happy with the blocking out, but I've struggled with the first round of refinement. I'm okay with the submersible vibe. I'll need to get the small details right to sell the idea that this is an orbital vehicle. It's maybe a tiny bit too smooth. Again, the final step should add suitable surface clutter.

I'll return to the project as a break from the planet painting work I'm scheduled to complete for Sparrow Films/Raptor.

Terrain play

Because there will always be terrain sculpting going on somewhere.

Rig progress (regression) and test animation

 

This rough animation helped me identify problems that will matter in a fly-past animation. Look out for what looks like a stray point light that the ship flies through, causing a weird light bloom.

Some of the later changes are not working for me. I may have started on the details too soon. Elements like the thruster packs which were done quickly and without much enthusiasm. I will do some rebuilding and improving today. First, a break, I think. A terrain, maybe...

Rig progress

 The Gypsey Vanner Medium Rig is progressing okay. When I left it last night, I was losing faith in the design, specifically the back end. It looked crude and a bit weird. This morning's polygon bashing has brought it back for me.

Time for a crit!

Key changes:

I want a rail on the fuel tank support rings. Those tanks come out by sliding forward. Maybe I should add tiny vernier thusters on the tank so they can guide themselves in?

The cargo rack is messy. I should redo it with cleaner lines.

The mid-section thruster block needs more work and detail. Like the forward thruster blocks, it is a detachable module.

The nose section should contain some fold-out sensors, chiefly a parabolic dish on a mast. If it looks too distracting, I'll go with something simpler.

 Although I now like the back end, it needs to be broken up a bit. Some detail blocks and possibly a docked drone/decoy on the top/centre line.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho

I write this entry just before heading off to my first day at my new job. Just 2pm-5pm, today.

Nervous? Yes, a little. As it should be, I think. On the Blender front, the Medium Rig I started a couple of days ago has turned a corner.

The sketch that nailed the overall design

First blocking-out

Middle detail and...bust

I didn't like the framework. While it was built more cleanly and quickly with the right approach, it doesn't look like a space system. Not "structural engineering" enough. So I restarted. This time the plan was to ditch the frame element, which didn't appear in the original sketch, anyway.

Into the level-3 detail too soon.

Still important decisions to make about the back end.

So far I'm happy with the results but I should have resolved the engines in more detail before worrying about the trimmings on the front. I'll go back there next. After work, in fact.