May soon

 Here we are in the final days of April, the first calendrical milestone of 2026, as a most eventful first quarter comes to an end. 

Sleep deprivation, thanks to waking up early, is my number one personal issue. I'm peaking at about 5 hours of sleep per night, which has been eroding my cognitive abilities without me really noticing — given that noticing is itself an act of cognition. I'm also getting back pain when I wake up, although, very thankfully, not so much during the day.

Lack of sleep affects appetite and eating habits, pushing me towards less healthy options, which in turn affects metabolic health and, potentially, sleep quality. Funily enough, all these things were an issue when I was in a career job, I just didn't have the bandwidth to really think about them. Instead, the whole team would report their insatiable need for strong coffee during morning meetings. 

I should:

Consider what changes I can make to improve my condition:

• Deal with the sleep issues?
• Is the bed or my sleeping position causing problems with my back?
• Ensure that the eating gets back under control. Maybe I should stick to a food plan that makes it harder to slip back into eating the odd biscuit or three.

Blender

As this is a Blender-related blog, let's get back on track.

Yesterday

I built a quick favela-style block building in the morning, instead of getting on with the pressing work of scene 02 terrain sculpting. I will get back on with that today.

Modular, for building big stacks

Superhive idea

I raised the idea of creating some planet textures a few months ago. This still seems like a good idea, as there aren't a huge number of available on the platform, and science fiction scenes are very popular. They don't take too long to complete, I can do a pretty good job, and they're easy to maintain if you sell them outside of an actual scene build.

A big moon with moon displacement. Room for customisation!

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. 

Brave old world

 

I can't show off the main planet-building work I'm doing for Sparrow Films, but here's one I'm working on for my portfolio, possibly for sale on Superhivemarket. "Cobolt" is a background/setting for the fantasy version of Cepheus Traveller. I drew the map a long time ago and it has gathered dust waiting for elaboration. I thought I'd take the place in a different direction--- into Blender.

Landmass/Sea mask

You'll notice things are busier and somewhat warped in the polar regions. This is to account for the need to project a nice tidy 2d map onto a spheriod, where your northern and southern extremes get stretched.

Warp factor 7, Mr Sulu!

 

Polar distortion cancels out the squashing

The masking begins... next come the landforms.

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.

Square one, again

 

World Mapping

I made a fair start on the new planet maps. I didn't spend as much time on it as I'd hoped. Too tedious? Not really, drawing thousands of miles of coastline is quite therapeutic, although I wasn't getting a very satisfying result with the default brushes, but switching to other brushes went too far.

Close-up of the region of interest with the arrowhead lake

Test render....displacement map is a leftover and is putting mountains in the sea

I won't be able to show off the finished result because of the NDA. I am still playing with the idea of creating a set of planet maps to sell on Superhivemarket.

Next step: I'll give the coastline a once-over. I think I need some more rivers branching from some of the bays. Some more broken coastline. If there's to be a polar cap, I might break up some of the northern and southern coasts to represent ice-age-related damage. 

By the end of today, I need to be making progress on the terrain painting, as I need this completed for Monday and don't want to work on it during the weekend.

Terrains

Just a terrain doodle I created last night. Trying not to get overwrought with the filters and to keep the scale realistic. The bumpy foreground is likely showing artefacts from some of the filtering...like tiny mounds.

16km terrain with a properly scaled mountain.

Mitte de Woche!

New social media portrait, since I had a haircut. I had to crop the Blender t-shirt because...Well, I hate how people use profile photos where they are small in the frame, as if the plants in the background are the essential element. I double hate when people crowd themselves out of their own profile picture by showing their loved ones. Honestly, I'd rather see a good photo of a houseplant.

Meep

Today's work

 So yesterday's assertion that I'd walk straight into the UDIM workflow proved to be false. I just couldn't get the Geo-Sim planet node tree to accept my UDIM files. I had to build a planet from scratch and ended up back at the day before's finishing point.

A 21k plate that covers about 30% of the planet's surface area...but it seems a bit distorted.

I had a stab at a procedural approach, which gives you seemingly unlimited detail by using smaller noise scales as you zoom in, but it never looks very convincing.

To avoid the faff of falling down a UDIMs rabbit hole, I may just get my original planet and start by upscaling the map and recreating it at 21k or higher. I can then cut down the planet and edit the texture map to include only what's in frame. Doing it this way gives me the flexibility to finalise the shot before cutting away unused material.

I have until Friday to deliver the 21k+ planet texture. Let's make it good!

Hard Ops

Very basic practice. Simple workflow callouts. It is starting to feel natural.

My plastic stackable chair won't win any design awards, but I might actually design one next time. Actually consider design elements rather than just flying through Hard Ops workflow to revise its essential steps.

World detour

 I did some additional planet content -- testing a move from 16k to 21k resolution. It's a lot of painting, and the previous strategy of smudging Earth terrain textures together doesn't work as well as you get a visual sludge at the regular viewing distance, even if things look sharper and better when you get close-in.

Calantica with 16k textures and the procedural planet material node tree

An aside to the detour: Aurore, from 2300AD

Base colour map. Meh!

Close-up, you realise how big a 21k map actually is! The coastline is too strong. For the next iteration, I will look into whether it's possible to add noise that suggests undersea terrain.

Test renders. That material is far from finished, but it looks okay as a starting point.

Aerial Shot - A new direction

 The director provided feedback on my last concept. He's come up with a new sequence, as follows:

Shot 1: Planet (Low Orbit) showing the local region

Shot 2: Aerial shot showing the rugged location of the up-and-coming service road scenes with a mountain range backdrop and, further back, a coastline and an island that features a city from which plumes of smoke are visible.

This seems to flow better, but it's going to be a challenge to smoothly segue from a very high altitude to a lower one. Do I need to create a planetary texture that features the landforms that are visible in the follow-on shot? Yes, I think I do.

What first?

What does the planet look like?

Draw it!

Calantica is a young world with a single major continent and a tectonic system that runs straight along the equator. The main human settlement, New Caligari, is located just north of the equator, surrounded by numerous resource-gathering settlements.

The area of interest is located on the coast of a small northern sea with a more moderate climate.

I tried to sketch the regional area but found it very hard to project accurately. 

What next?

Build it!

1. Grab a big Earth texture map. I used a 16k map.

2. Clone the sea and make that the top layer. 

3. Import the sketched planet map, and use your image editor's tools to cut away the background. 

4. Create another layer and use it to trace the coastline in a black outline. This is where you can create the fine detail that will make the most of your 16k resolution. Once you have the coastline outline, fill it with black. It's a mask!

5. The sea around coastlines is lighter because continental shelves are shallow. One way to get that light-blue coastal sea is to create a copy of the landmass mask, paint it light blue, and apply a strong blur. Once you're happy, you can merge the deep-sea and coastal shallows layers.

6. Now use the landmass mask to cut a hole in the sea layer through which the familiar terrain of planet Earth will show through.

7. This part is fun/therapeutic. Use your image editor's powerful clone / infill brush  to paint into the big gaps using Earth's biomes. Careful brushing can create appropriate biomes such as mountain ranges, dry and temperate zones. Start by getting the land filled in without worrying too much about the details.

8. Once your land is filled in, start blending and cloning away the harsh borders.

9. You'll need a specularity map that will make the seas more reflective than the land. This is easy to create using a white layer and your land mask. There's an extra step, though! While creating the land textures, you should include big rivers and lakes, which also need to be selected, copied on top of the spec mask, and set as white patches, so they catch the light just like the oceans.

10. You might need a displacement map, although this can be fudged using Blender nodes. In True SKY 3, the Earth shader already does this.

Well, that's the easy part done. There will be fine-tuning required once you are happy with your staging, so you will understand which areas need the most attention to detail.