It's about to get busy with Christmas, just a bit of time to tinker with last night's previs shot of the ship arriving. This version has the ship dropping down through the clouds. It's a slower, more plausible staging for a ship that is hundreds of metres long.
I spent most of today tweaking the previs terrain for the service road. It's now reasonably close to the ARMA 3 storyboard. Matching a 3d model up with the output of a game engine is a weird way to do this. Artistically constraining for questionable reasons, but a great exercise in the technical side of environmental design. Is this close enough? We'll see!
Stand-in character placement
I created each canyon wall with a cube that I extruded along the undulating path. I then stripped away all the geometry except for the inward faces, which then served as a geo-scatter target for various test assets. I ended up with a chunky piece of wall that I created using Rockify.
Manual placement to (mostly) match the storyboard
Lens sim FTW
Bushes
Overview of the key area
Character placement might be tricky with the current small boulder implementation. Looks quite nice, but I might need to push them back into the wall to avoid limiting the animators.
I recreated a section of the terrain used in the film project. Alas, it wasn't close enough to the reference model, so I'm rebuilding using a more precise one.
Nice shape, shame it doesn't match the director's requirements.
Arma3 game area reference
Routed mapped directly from the ARMA 3 reference
World Creator sculpt
Floor section
Next, I'll build proxy cliff wall assets, then rocks and trees.
For the cliff assets, I have been experimenting with both Rockify and Rock it V2.
I break up from my part-time job at the end of the week. It's then Blender all the way down...well mostly. We have a family holiday coming up, but I intend to be very productive over the summer break. I might even make some money again using Blender.
Blender 4.5 is now official
After a good month of testing 4.5, it has now entered general availability. So far, so good. It's fast and ...mostly stable. I suspect that a number of my commonly used addons will require some updates.
Recent Work
A planet map...a bit of a change
Lens Sim practice
A depth of field test
Suddenly
I have a new production task on the animation project. I need to provide a terrain for the previs animation. Interesting!
A work in progress. Some changes have come from the director, but I had a good time confirming that the workflow is effective:
1. World Creator sculpt.
2. Export EXR heightmap. 3. Blender/Import the EXR into True Terrain 5. Create the terrain material.
4. Bake the required terrain resolution, then bake the material maps.
