A May week

 

Cthulhu chamber

Playing around with modular concrete rooms that connect together to form endless interiors... A quick and dirty animation! 

Fun, but rough. I'll create rooms with a bit more detail and nuance, should I come back to this again. The most important thing I got out of this exercise is a reminder that every video I create always turns into a stuttering, artefact-laden mess. I need to investigate what steps I should be taking to not make them that way. This is annoying because I'm already rendering to stills and completing the animation in DaVinci Resolve.

Update required

Halo director wants an update on the terrain. It's still dragging because its slow work, but lets see if I can get it finished this weekend. 

Gamma 2 - random photo (National Space Centre)

Material Wealth

 I took a break from worrying about the lack of progress on the Halo terrain to practice with the material setup I learned from Nico Linde's video.

I tried this approach right after the tutorial, but I didn't explore its full capabilities. Today, I did. Wow!

3 textures blended with curves. Add grunge and a bit of ambient occlusion. Result!

This is so good because the setup gives you a lot of power to tweak and change using any three suitable texture file sources. Also, cooking things like specularity, roughness, and normal maps using nodes is cheaper in memory, although you could get results quite as good as a fully developed PBR material.

Quick terrain to order

Someone on the TrueVFX discord asked for advice on creating a terrain. I gave them my three pence worth. 

True Terrain's built-in tools

World Creator effort

I wasn't happy with World Creator's lifts. I need to figure out how to create cracked bedrock-style cliffs with lots of fragmented blocks.

Modular Construction

The material development was for these handy building blocks

Coming together nicely.

Later, I'll create decorative elements such as pipes and air-conditioning units.