Blender School: Terrain 5 Materials

 I need to up my game. Seriously, I have been doing rookie-level terrain materials since I started using True Terrain 5. I'd just apply a few materials separated by simple masks. If I used filters, it was just a cheap hack to adjust the material's uniform appearance, such as darkening it.

When True Terrain 5 offered some pre-made materials, it was a revelation. I suddenly realised what all those weird colour adjustment nodes were used for.

Oh wow, Big Sanctus update

You can't use Sanctus material on True Terrain 5 unless you ditch its brilliant material system. I was adding a material to the focus object in my test scene when I remembered there had been a Sanctus update.

Sanctus Library is the work of Blender artist Sanctus, who has become a legend in procedural materials. His library now contains 1000+ assets. Really, it's unlimited because it's so darn procedural, with so many parameters to drive. More on this update, later, when I've run through all the changes.

Some of the masks

Slope Mask set to very tight for contrasty cliffs, etc

Valley Mask for a gradient on slopes rather than a tight band.

This procedural mask is a severe limitation, in that at high contrast settings it produces banding, sometimes creating a moiré effect.

Actual Mask files are memory-expensive, but offer much more power.

Patch Mask, cheap and flexible, is a first step in adding noise patches.

Good Friday, fallow Friday

 Happy Easter, peeps!

Test lamp down at the base...just not enough light down there.

Weird holiday that requires some serious mental gymnastics to transmute into a "celebration". Chocolate does so much heavy lifting!

I still feel very rough, maybe not quite as rough. It's now nearly a week since I did my regular resistance training and walking. I feel a bit "fallow", but I need to start pushing myself, even if I don't feel good.

Clara is on a late shift, so I need to get some groceries to feed the boys tonight.

Blender

I made a bit of progress on the apartment complex yesterday. Working mostly to improve the materials and UVs in key places. Not a lot of work, but some nice tweaks here and there. I'm particularly pleased with the single plane that I textured with a high-contrast noise map, which is placed behind the window panes of each apartment block. This provides a random element that breaks up the unrealistic unity of the many windows.

Much of the remaining work will be about breaking up regularity and adding more detail in the right places.

So, what's next?

Firstly, the version of the scene where I had created two more tunnel instances crashed when I tried to delete them. I've reverted to the single instance-version of the scene. If I want the apartments to rise higher, I need to let more light in. When there are apartments that rise into the sky, they block most of the light, and it just gets too dark.



I will do an animation for this scene, to be completed by Monday. I need to create a storyboard and use that to work out where I need more details. There's a good foundation for some scenes, but I need to break up the regularity. For example:

• Something to break up the regularity of the railings.
• Signs, notices and decals
• Street lights
• Street furniture
• Rubbish and clutter
• Crowds? 
• Something in the central pool? 
• Cables and wiring
• More pipes

That water is looking good. It's from the Sanctus Library

A day for Odin

 Progress Report

I invested a considerable amount of time creating "hero" assets with Nature Generator. It's great, and it seems more stable than I first thought. 

Little rocky heroes

The only screaming limitation is the lack of a built-in material-baking tool. These assets are now plain meshes with the Nature Gen Geometry Node trees applied. Ready to share! However, the materials are still using the addon's procedural systems. To make these rocks easy to share, I'd need to turn the procedural results into PBR textures, which would require that the objects be given good UVs. I may run some tests to see if I can create a UV map for an object while maintaining the great texture results, and then use the baking tool I have from the Sanctus Library.

Quick practice scene

Service Road

I haven't forgotten about the tunnel section of the service road. I had put it off, as I thought the scatter step wasn't going to be much fun. Turns out it was okay.

From above - near cave entrance

View from within the cave

Overview

Next

That scene will need to be optimised. I used detailed assets because they give a much better sense of how much the tunnel is obscured, but at the cost of a very big scene -- about 1GB.

More Blender School! I have courses! I have the last section of the environmental design course to complete.

Stunning

 I have new assets. Black Friday will be my ruin!

These are, without question, the finest Blender assets I've ever had. Hollywood-standard triple-AAA super assets. Astronova from Big/Medium/Small Assets

So good!

So very, very good

I will be creating a science fiction scene very soon.

Blender School

I didn't have time to complete more training, but I will complete 2-3 more Digital Sculpting lessons before the weekend.

New from Sanctus!

Sanctus 3.2 is now out!

Some nice things!

Another True-Terrain off-the-cuff piece.

Lucy finds the Mhenga hive.

Free-Trader Coasting

 

I moved into materials work a little early. There are some important elements, such as the vernier-style thruster ports on the nose and a few more surface details here and there. So I'll declare this Not Finished. An advancing work-in-progress.