Wednesday project

This morning, I decided to invest a couple of hours into a mini-project before returning to the big stuff. At work, I'd been watching the crafting of a simple -- but really elegant -- deck chair. One that slots together rather than uses complex pivots and hinges. I recreated the chair from memory -- making some errors through the process.

 I originally had the seat slats sit flush on their legs, but when flush this way, the seat element doesn't get held in place when the two elements are stored or carried flat --without the overhang on the slats, it just falls through the back frame. You really understand a thing after you try to build and use it (virtually, in this case).

True-Sky render

I tried using Physical Starlight and Atmosphere, but I got crashes, so I tried True-Sky 3. It's great for landscape shots, though its rendering trickery does result in an overly soft output in many cases. PSA is better for a studio-style subject...when it works.

True Terrain 3.2

A fix for Blender 5.2, although I spotted and raised some issues. This could be a corruption of my installation. Blender 5.2 is turning out like Blender 5.1, a bit crashy, maybe as a result of changes to the API.

Warning: End of Civilization!

 I lost a significant amount of productivity over the last couple of days, thanks to an impulsive decision to reinstall Civilisation V. What a terrible mistake. That game is such a driver of the "one more round" compulsion in me. I completed two full playthroughs and two games that were discarded or lost.

Some game time...

Best game so far!

I have somehow managed to play this game for many years with only a minimal understanding of the mechanics. This last game introduced me to elements such as deal-making with the city-states and the finer art of military conflict.

I was set upon by my imperialistic neighbours, Napoleon and Catherine the Great. I managed to hold out on their expansion and refused to sign any peace treaty. This appears to disrupt their strategy, as they ended up fighting each other instead of advancing their attack. Perhaps a kink in the AI was introduced to make the game less challenging? I concentrated on economic and technological growth until I had artillery, at which point you could sweep through any nation that was less developed. I ended up turning them both into rump states, taking possession of Paris, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. A long and drawn-out conflict that makes me realise that war is shit. In fact, I think I only won the game by not pursuing a maximal military victory and instead shifting my huge empire towards technological progress, allowing me to secure the space-race victory with a perhaps 20-round lead over the Ottomans.  

Mini-Project

Always respect the time-box. This probe (the lander element) was supposed to be a single-day/couple-of-sessions project. It wasn't to be. Note the space probe in the foreground is not my work, it's from the Big/Medium/Small Astronova collection. That stuff is absolutely mind-blowingly good, but too expensive for me to get the whole lot.

Next

I must complete the service road section and submit it, then begin work on the third section, which is quite large.

On the way to a quick Blender project...

 I started an entirely different quick Blender project.

I decided that I needed to finish my "pile of rocks" quick project, but that a chrome ball wasn't enough of a subject to justify the effort. What should go there, instead? A hard-surface model, a space probe!

I was eager to create a hard-surface model, so I began developing the idea of a lander/probe. I didn't bother to do any sketches; I got most of my inspiration from the escape pod that featured in the first Star Wars movie.

Thruster package

Propulsion Unit

Landing Leg. Meh!

I knocked together a set of landing legs. It was functional, but the design quality was poor. None of the components related effectively to any of the other parts. I decided to down tools and have another go this morning.

Much better

I finished off the session by cleaning up the scene, assigning basic materials and arranging the model elements more effectively, such as creating a set of landing legs in both the up and down positions. This lets you stage the probe in both configurations by turning one set off and the other on.

 Next...

Finish the model, adding details such as arms and sensor projections. Might I take inspiration from the probe droid from The Empire Strikes Back? We'll see!

And then...

Optimise the Tunnel section of the Service Road, then begin work on the next section.

Timeout

 I've had a couple of days where I didn't get much done. I played with World Creator and found myself going through the old flow of sculpting a terrain, exporting maps and playing with them in Blender. Not very useful or productive, it's a therapy thing.

The colour map is "banded". Commented as a bug

Today, I found what appears to be a serious bug in the latest World Creator beta that corrupts exported material maps. As good a reason as any to go away and do something more productive. I'm supposed to be doing a final clean-up on the service road, but I wanted a weekend break.

Dark Tower

Last night I watched a YouTube video about the Texas Towers. Built by the U.S. Air Force in the late 1950s, these oil rig-like structures provided extended radar coverage of America's eastern seaboard. The final tower (Tower-4) was notorious because it was sunk in a storm, dooming its crew to a watery grave.

Texas Tower

The story touched a nerve. I love these structures, so I decided to create a quick model. Time limited to be completed tomorrow.

Work-in-progress

Boulton holding station...

 I've reached a culmination point with the Boulton. I'll go back and fix and improve things at some point, but for now, it's kind of done.

I will build the two Gordon-class Sloops that will attach to the back of the Boulton. I may also make a quick video.

Folded away

Folded out

Flare!!!

Boulton's on patrol

Commonwealth Ship Moran

More Boulton-class

 

I thought that I might have had it finished today. It wasn't to be! Some of the finer details got messy, so I'd backtrack a few times. 

I wanted to break up the mission section so I made these big boolean insets. They look nice and structural but because of the way the hull tapers there's a slight inconsistency that makes the feature less convincing. I put point defense turrets onto the top edge of the insets, then inside the insets. It was getting way too cluttered. I decided to append the previous version of the hull for now. There was just a bit too much detail all over the place.

Insets

Clutter-bug

The cabin section has been rebuilt to be consistent with the command module. Previously, it was angular in profile, while the command module at the front is curved. I fitted frames on the front lug where the spin habitats rest when folded in. 

Clutter back

The current challenge is to fit the ship with a lot of ordnance, including sensor drones, decoy drones, combat drones, and missiles. The problem is that it quickly looks like a mess. I looked at aircraft pylons, but you don't get the right look on a big hull. It seems like better inspiration comes from military ships of the ocean, which manage to festoon their decks with clutter but make it look right.

Before downing tools, I quickly looked at the design with a space environment...

Boulton's back!

 So I've been trying to build a starship from Charles E. Gannon's Caine Riordan: Terran Republic novels. It's the Bolton/Boulton-class cruiser.

The previous attempt was back in January this year. See these previous posts. I was pretty happy with how it was going but not happy enough to push on. I decided it was time to return to the Terran Republic, and I'd still like to build a shift carrier, a giant space vehicle very similar to the Earth ships that appear in the Avatar movies.

On with the Boulton, for now:

January's version:

More curvy but not as dagger-shaped.

Today's efforts:

Spin habitats folded in.

Spin habitat folded out.

Rigging and bone problems and new flares

Unhinged!

New hinge system ready to be rigged.

 I finally threw myself into the Blender rigging. I was firing on all cylinders, raring to go, but I repeatedly bounced off the wall. This stuff is hard, or I'm really stupid. Wait! I know I'm stupid, but both cases could be simultaneously true. You can see why this is making me glum.

The problem: Rigging uses several interconnected systems, all entirely new for me. This is animation, of which I know almost nothing. This type of animation uses an armature system, like an old-fashioned puppet's wood-pins-and-string skeleton. I don't know anything about armatures. Except, they're made out of bones. Bones define where movement happens, what constraints are placed on the movement, and what effect movement has on the overlayed mesh. Bones seem hard. There are many hidden rules about how all these systems relate and interact.

Like so many problems, this one started with YouTube—lots of YouTube! I've watched about six videos on rigging rigid-body systems, like pistons and hinges, but it hasn't sunk in.

So what next? Training—proper Training! It just so happens there's a good Udemy Blender animation course on sale. So, I enrolled and will gradually work through 8 hours of knowledge.

This has been dispiriting, but it reminds me of the first few hours of using Blender. Crushing ignorance weighs you down, but if you are patient, you slowly make your way up the wall. Tomorrow, I will climb that wall!

Why do I need this knowledge? It's that hinge system! I rebuilt it so that it straddles the support rings instead of working only off one ring. Well, it made sense at the time, although I'm still not sure that if I rig this system up, it will actually work as expected.

FLARED!!!

I bought an add-on for lens flares (Flared XT). Seriously, you can't go into space without beautiful blooms and flare artefacts. This one works well, although it also works surprisingly weirdly. You'd think the addon did some kind of post-production magic through the compositor, but oh no. It generates in-scene transparencies, which create the effect directly through the render engine (Cycles or EeVee).

Bloom transparencies in the viewport and the output result

One limitation of this technique is that you must greatly increase the number of transparency layers supported in Cycles. I think I had to go up to 200. Eevee is unaffected as it supports unlimited transparency layers.

Flare!

Ring of flare!

Mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container (test animation)

Shiny! Also enormously expensive in terms of poly count

 Yesterday's efforts included rough material selection. There are still no decals, though. I did some more clean-up and rebuilt the fuel bladder.  



I created a test animation during my lunch break. Then, another longer animation was rendered last night.

Animation frame.

Moving modules to a second support/spin ring could have made a cleaner hinge system that works off the opposite ring instead of at the module's own root. I might do a rebuild, but if I do, it will be done after the module lander.

Mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container - What next..

 I made some good progress. Some changes here and there.

I now need to focus on getting the build finished. There will need to be some additional touches. I will rebuild the fuel bladder and add communication equipment and external stores. Suddenly, the container's panels look sparse, but I prefer them that way for now.

Space lighting

The containers are now orientated so that the floors align with the cradle when folded for spin. Nice. The cradle structure on the outer-facing walls looks awfully cluttered, but I can live with it. It might look good with the proper lighting and staging.

Clutter-bug: Folded down for spin

Folded-out for acceleration-as-gravity

Mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container - Test Run

 It's Tuesday morning. Rather than pushing on with the build, I needed to jump ahead to test that the fully populated container frame doesn't look too cluttered.

Spin ring reversed

Testing out the reversed direction of the ring. So it doesn't look like this fixes the issue in that folding downwards puts the container's floor where the roof would need to go. This might be a time when cool-looking wins out against realistic. To be decided.

So I had a thought: Instead of doubling up the containers on the ring, how about a second ring where the containers are offset so all the containers can fold in together?

I like it!

I really like it, but it might look horribly cluttered when viewed from other directions.

Folded down for spinning.

Firstly, the hinge system didn't work as I hoped. When folded down, the hinge isn't locked in a properly load-bearing position. It does fold in, but not as expected. This might not matter, as it's all lost in the complicated latticework.

It does look a bit cluttered, but not so much that extra padding cannot remedy it. To this end, I thought that I'd add fuel bladders. That's bags instead of solid tanks at the midsection. These quickly modelled cloth bags must have had a massive polycount, as the render took minutes instead of seconds. I think this is working.

This was a quickly hashed test setup. Before continuing with this configuration, I'll return to the previous file version for fixes, refinements, and build optimization.

Mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container (Round Two!)

 The mini-project continues. I'm reasonably happy with the progress. The idea that this would be a super-quality build has fallen aside. I'm having a horrendous time with Fluent. It may be a bug, a scene corruption, or my keyboard or mouse has been sticking. I managed to get what I needed, though.

Understated Pod

I wanted the container pod to avoid excessive sculpting and boolean cuts, which are too easy to make but hard to justify. This is actually two of the units I built stuck together to get the dimensions close to the stand-in module.

Nonetheless, the hinge system needed to be rebuilt to better match the new form.

Longer and with a bigger cage

Interesting story here. The pivot is in the wrong direction. I hadn't noticed when I first blocked it out, but under spin, the roof would become the floor. Not ideal, but not a show-stopper. The fix might be as easy as having the pods pivot forward instead of towards the rear. Then, the pod's deck floor would be on the outer side.

Progress made:

• Command module with a first round of details, including windows.
  
• Two containers are attached directly to the hull. These don't spin and are probably used for stores. They mate with the hull via an airlock block at the rear. This is the bit that caused me so much woe.
• Note that the structural ring has a bunch of boolean cuts to show that it is a structural frame and doesn't contain any bits.

Tomorrow: Finish the primary build steps. Clean up. Some materials, some lamps. Then...Drum Roll... I will bone and rig the hinge machinery to animate the modules folding down. I watched a tutorial, and it looks complicated but this is me laughing at my comfort zone as I side down the rockface. 

A new mini-project: Orbital Elements Modular Container

 It's time to build another space vehicle, this time one of my own designs. I'm also looking to make it available for sale, which is forcing me to be more careful in the build process. Every time I try to ignore some lousy meshwork, I see some future customers looking at duplicated verts or shader artefacts and then raising complaints.

This extra level of care might be eroded over time. We will see.

The idea:

The concept

Containers that pivot on their support ring

This heavy rig travels at 1g to its destination. During the journey, it accelerates forward, creating simulated gravity. The container units pivot on their support ring so that their decks are oriented appropriately. Once at the destination, the engines turn off, and the vehicle sits in an orbit. The containers then pivot ninety degrees so that gravity can be simulated by spinning the rig on its forward-rear axis. This model was built in July 2023. I liked the concept but not the execution of some elements. Particularly those Space 1999 Eagle-like Drone module trucks. So it's time for some new and improved!

Blocking out

Do the fiddly stuff First. In this case, the container hinge system.

Happy enough with this as a starting point.

Checking out what it looks like with more containers. I might fit another six on the ring...

Time for a break. I want to do a good job of the container module. That will be a project in itself.