Start of Week

 Here we are, burning through the summer holidays. It feels like we're only just starting, when in fact we are more than halfway through. Time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. 

Last week's progress: I get a pass! I was on holiday in Europe. This week will come with high expectations. Fully rested and raring to go? Well, maybe.

Aims

Halo: Raptor

New instructions from the new Environmental art lead. I'm to return to the opening planet scene and redo it following a different artistic vision. Marvellous! Who doesn't like throwing away two months of work? Well, this is the job; it's how it works. If you are too precious about work product, you are probably not cut out for commercial film/content production. That said, the fact that they didn't think that I "knocked it out of the park" with the last run-through is not a great sign. The new directions give me concern; they are driven by a series of Midjourney frames that, in my humble opinion, are overcooked -- like much of Midjourney's output. They are eye-poppingly attractive, but it just looks like gloss over substance: a striking image that doesn't support looking too closely at the details.

Training

Where to start? So much to cover. I feel like I need revision on everything, but I need to start somewhere. I'll draw up a priority list. It could be that I focus on environmental design because of the project, although I would like to get back to basics for some stuff. 

I have a ton of addons that I have not yet touched. I need to install them, read up on use and give them some practice.

I need to build a good camera rig. Souternshotty does a great tutorial on his setup. I will follow that again.

Physical Addons has their Atmosphere 2. It looks like a shameless copy of TrueVFX's True Sky3. I don't make such comments lightly, but given that Atmosphere 2 includes an Earth model that supports planetary atmospheres, rather than making that functionality part of their PCO: Planets addon, seems rather twisted. All said, I will be picking up a copy after the current sale -- which seems weird but its because the sale offers a small discount, but I can get a big discount as an owner of their first version, only during Superhive sales; you can't choose the bigger discount, it's the sale discount or nothing, until the end of the sale.

Sell something!

I'm looking at putting a package of scanned objects together and selling them really cheap. Rocks, mostly. I need to process the scans:

1. Make the objects watertight -- most need a bottom.
2. Extract the texture maps from the object and store them in a consistent file structure.
3. Turn them into assets and create an asset library. I may need to read up on the best way to do this so that when shared it works as expected.

Plan B will be a series of planet maps, created from an improved workflow that comes out of next week's Halo project work.

It seems like the new lead thinks my textures were not crisp enough. That was feedback on my 32k x 16k master file!! Planets are really big; when you start getting close in, you need monster-sized files. I'm already using files that are an order of magnitude larger than most of the production team because I have a workstation-class machine to work on.

I see pixelation! More resolution!!!

I see a 21k x 10k planet map. Oh, that's pretty big. Smaller filesize!!!

New week, new start, new washing machine

 Week beginning 6th July.

I had a moderately successful night of sleep, waking, as I do, just before dawn. Porridge and coffee has powered me through getting the boys off to school and, just now, overseeing the installation of our new Hisense WF3S1043BW3_WH -- they need to stop using codes and switch to a pleasing mnemonic system, making it something like "Hisense Washer-Starfish-Indigo-Square-3"

Wifi Washing?!

This unit is Wi-Fi-connected because, of course, you need to control it using an app.

Start of Week (6-July-26)

Last week's big fail was making no progress on the city model. I just found other things to do, mostly Gaea-related. I made a start on a personal project without first forming a proper idea. I installed and played with the latest version of Random Flow. No big changes to my workflow.

This week:

• Team meeting with the new head Env Artist, Brannan. Exactly when is still to be decided. It sounds like there is to be a discussion of the viewpoints of my terrain scenes. I hope this is just a refresher on what was previously agreed and not some kind of very late-in-the-day change that will greatly impact the scenes. That said, shot002 is so hard because it's taken from such a high altitude. 
• Get that city finished.
• Finish a personal project. Something small!
• I need a refresh of my environmental design skills. It could be timely to redo the training course I bought this time last year. (Efficient Environmental Design - Piotr Kryski) Also, finish installing and evaluating a whole slew of add-ons that I bought in bundles but hardly touched.

Grassy

A Most Fallow Weekend

 I got almost nothing done over the weekend, except for normie stuff like washing, cleaning, cooking, and some exercise. 

Sidetracked while preparing a terrain for Gabe's challenge. A different sidetrack in itself.

Start of the Week (SOW)

Last week felt like grinding to a halt. This week, we'll turn it all around. Honest, we will!

1) Scene 002 Completion. The Director wants to chat about staging. Annoying that staging has been agreed for a long time, but we're still developing the scene's fundamentals. I can move the camera up a bit once the critical elements are done. They are: City and structures, materials, and scatters.

To this end, I need materials and terrain completed so that I can bake the terrain into a proper mesh, not a True Terrain object. I can then cut it into pieces and split it into 3-4 layers to break up the scatter elements.

2) Lots of Gaea tutorials and exercises. We'll be Gaea-proficient in a week. Honest, we will!

An output to Blender in less than ten minutes. V. gratifying!

3) Start a substantial but slow-burning personal project that has a strong possibility of making some money through sales in the Superhivemarket store.

The game's afoot!

 Gabe has provided a Gaea-created terrain that I will attempt to match in World Creator. He's not gone out of his way to make this extra-difficult; it doesn't use any wildly complex erosion forms. However, it's still shows that Gaea output can just look very natural straight out of the door. This could still be a challenge.

I should have specified that the results should be shown in Blender, because the test is for terrain forms, not Gaea's native rendering/materials capabilities.

 Gabe's challenge. See his work: https://www.artstation.com/gabe_dobsky

Start of the week

Last week's aims:

Scene 002: I made progress by going to the asset preparation. Mostly the city and the depot, which are close to completion. That's a tick! I will finish the scene this week.

Superhive trades: Some thought. Nothing structured, nothing like a plan. Given that I paid out a fortune to get a porch roof repaired, I really need to focus more on bringing in some money. Put this into this week's aims.

Blender School: I actually looked into two areas:

Random Flow
I followed the more recent tutorial, and I have a practice exercise, the results of which I will show off tomorrow. It's still an amazing tool, but you need to use it right; too many users think it's all you need for surface detail, but it's got to be balanced with designed elements, or it looks obviously like a lot of random greebles.

Panels, Extrusions, and Slices. Scratching the surface of Random Flow!

HardOps/Boxcutter
Oh gawd, I think I have completely lost all the knowledge. I struggled to do something really basic with Boxcutter, and the notes I created in this blog didn't help much. A proper refresher will be required. Frustrating, but at least I know it's an issue.

This week's new aims:

Complete Gabe's challenge, today. Strict time-box! I need to complete Scene 002, this week.

The Random Flow practice exercise: Today/Tomorrow. This is a personal effort that shouldn't bleed into the working week, but if it isn't finished by the end of tomorrow, it won't be. One of the reasons it didn't get finished is that I am trying to be a lot more active during weekends. I spend much of one day getting out into the world and taking photos. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lucasdigital/

Photography

Some of yesterday afternoon's efforts:

City Centre from Parkwood Springs

Looking back towards home, from Parkwood Springs