It's time for....prod--uct--iv-ity...

 After a weekend of bouncing around inside my own head, I begin the week with more clarity and focus. Let's scoop it all up and put it into this morning's work!

Weekend

I did nearly three hours of "rucking" -- that's walking with a heavy rucksack. I marched forcefully to the city centre and back, swaying occasionally, so I probably looked drunk when hoofing up the steeper hills. It was hard, but it felt good—then. Now, I am still a bit sore. Apparently, I'd packed twice the recommended 10% of my body weight payload -- some 16kg in all. It doesn't seem right to halve the payload for the next session. I'll see how I feel about it next week.

I didn't do much in the creative area. I finished some TV shows: Murderbot (great fun), Season 3 of Slow Horses (silly fun), and some Attack on Titan, with my son, Noah.

Planet "Cobolt"

I'm reasonably happy with the landmass/ocean mask, although there's room for improvement. I've started painting, cloning, and inpainting different biomes and will try to add more dramatic mountain ranges, which I'll need to source large Earth samples from somewhere.  This time, I'll look to make some colour tweaks to make it look a bit different.

This week

For Sparrow/Raptor, I need to deliver the Scene 000 planet scene once I have completed a tidy-up on the planet maps. I then need to sculpt the close-in area of the setting, adding a distinctive arrowhead-shaped lake to make the transition from orbital vp to aerial vp as clear as possible.

Then, apparently, I'm going back to the service road. I think it's all going to need redoing in a mightier and lower-poly mesh.

For personal Project work

Just finish something?!

Shamrayev has chilled to the point where it will take a lot of effort to get it back into production.

The medium rig, which finally received some acceptable progress on Friday. Some of the UVs are typically shonky, although it might not matter, as I'm unlikely to invest the time in learning to do a detailed custom texture using the new Matplus addon.

Scatter tests

It seems like True SKY 3/True-Terrain 5, and Geoscatter now play better together, although I was seeing an apparent bug with one of the scatter modes I use a lot (scatter to a bezier) that didn't seem to work. I need to put together more scenes with more carefully applied scatter systems to ensure everything works when needed.

A first step...floaty-same-tree 

Whoosh...goes the deadline

 The Christmas hols are ending. I'm back to work tomorrow, with an early start. This was the logical deadline for finishing the Shamrayev. Alas, I do need to move on as I'm committed to returning to the Raptor project, which calls for the urgent creation of some aerial concept shots. 

The command module lost its colour banding because you just can't get away with painting colour strikes just by painting mesh faces. The subject calls for more complex shapes with bevelled corners. It looks much better without them. Maybe I'll create a texture map with more complex go-faster stripes?

The first attempt at the "flag" seems okay. Is it too big? Having a flag is an anachronism because identification would be through advanced full-spectrum sensors at thousands of kilometres. But it's a cool way to include the vessel's colours and name. It feels like a worthy dedication to today's Ukrainian fighters.

I'm going to create new spin habs with improved cloth cushioning.
And I'll add some more details to the engineering block.

I started to do some clean-up. The hanger door elements were consolidated and can now open. I plan to do work on the hangar's interior as well as model one or more sub-craft, possibly two "shuttles" which I envisage as "space cars".

Shamreyev Details

 Okay, playtime is over. It's time to start adding bolts and buttons. 

Shamreyev's Big:Medium:Small modelling approach has finally arrived at small. Did I already do some small things? Yes, I nearly always step outside the build order for the odd thing. In real life, there are small things because some things need to be small. In modelling, there are small things to break up areas and add interest. A super tanker is defined by its big ship shape, but it needs those tiny railings and surface equipment to sell its scale.

I've decided to go with the streamlined command module and play on the idea that it can operate as a separate vehicle. I'm not in love with the design, but if I can get the surface details right, it will work fine.

Rescale

I'd decided that some critical ship elements are too small, it would be too cramped in the hab modules, and there's not enough room in the hangar for anything bigger than a family car. So I need to rescale everything. It can be a pain to use the scale tool on object collections, as you will need to reset the scale, and Blender may send notifications/complaints about every individual object that is instanced or related at Blender's data level. 

I believe the best approach is:

1. Unhide everything so that you don't miss the rescale operation. In this case, I made sure that my scale reference figure is not included, given the point of the exercise is to make the ship a bit bigger relative to the figure.

2. Create an empty cube. Place it where you can select it. I placed it in the centre of the ship and scaled it up to encompass everything. Resetting the scale, of course.

3. Parent all the ship's objects to the cube.

4. Rescale the cube, using its object panel to ensure the rescale is precisely right.

5. Reset the scale. Everything should have a scale of 1:1:1

6. Delete the empty. All the elements were rescaled, and the scale was reset without complaint.

Rescaled to +40% New total length: 304m

Even rescaled, those spin habitats are really too small for comfort. You'd get away with fractional simulated gravity, but to make them generate 1g, they would spin like the wheels of a car, and you would get very uncomfortable.

Details start to arrive. Some windows! Wooo!

I'll return to the modelling tonight.

First Friday

 This morning I worked up another terrain. Not for therapy! I really wanted to test out 64km of terrain. That is huge, and as I discovered, it's too easy to view from too high. I had the camera essentially in low Earth orbit (that's only 1-2 terrain lengths), which reduced the terrain to a very faint, rather meh. However, there was something else going on. It might be a bug in World Creator triggered by the extreme terrain dimensions or the shape layers. 

I'll try again next week. A 64km terrain is maybe too big.

Meh!

Shamrayev  

I came back to the Shamrayev this afternoon and immediately got stuck. I don't have a fully worked-out idea for the command module. I wanted either to dress it up or completely rebuild it.                                                                              

More mission pods, but they make no sense. But I do like adding a blocky area.

This is a bit more like the original 90s design but I wasn't feeling it.

This has a nice space tech vibe. I suddenly imagine the command module detaching from the rest of the ship and becoming a lander. It's outside the bounds of this project, so I'm only hinting at landing struts. I suggest adding some external engines. 

It's time for the final modelling run. 

1. Fine details - ladders, airlocks, lamps, etc 
2. Clean up and fix any obvious issues.

3. Optimisation and finalisation (applying modifiers).
4. Redo UVs and create some textures.

Suddenly, "nearly done" doesn't feel quite so near the finish line.

Day 1 Year 2026

 The year 2026 begins with a quiet day. Clara was sleeping off a night shift, so the boys and I had to sneak  around the house. I went for a walk for an hour and did some photogrammetry captures—nothing very good, alas.

Terrain therapy

More terrain sculpting. I needed a break from the Shamrayev, but I'll return to it tomorrow. I need to get it to a state of completion, as I'm already being called back to the Raptor film work. I'll produce an update to the recent aerial shot.

Two hundred and one: an unexpectedly elongated space ship modelling odyssey

 Here we are, standing at the gates of 2026. This was my unofficial deadline for the Shamrayev. Oh hum. Deadlines come, and deadlines go. There's no chance of a proper completion, as some areas require extensive reworking. That bulbous head needs to be broken up or completely redesigned. Even after all the materials and textures are done, I'll be adding countless lights, some of which I want to animate. Maybe I'll share a work-in-progress shot or test animation in the next few days.

Colour helps separate key elements.

Turning my attention to the propulsion system

On a whim, I decided to paint the superstructure a distinctive colour to see how well it separates visually from the ship's modules. Pretty well! That yellow is becoming a house style for my space ship trusses and structural elements. A developing house-style or a design crutch..hard to say.

This is so close to a first pass completion, but I can already feel a desire to:

•  Start chopping and changing the command module. I could change its shape a bit, or start completely again. The sensor pod needs a quick redesign, or at least some rearrangement. 
  
  
• The spin habitat drums want to be flush with the other modules. I could replace the padded elements so that they stick out more. I already said that I'd go back and replace those.
  
  
•  Most of the modules require textures and will also include displacement/normal mapping for fine details. Although some of the detailing will be modelled. Maybe some ladders and some balcony elements?
  
  
• Cargo racks will be attached to the central trusses. Not too much, not too big.
  
  
• I'll add some elements to the cable support masts. The top one might have a sailing ship-style sail that carries the ship's name and the Ukrainian flag. Those are elements that I should have included in my degree show version.

Tidy up and time to make final design changes.

2 0 0

 As mentioned, today's post broke the two-hundredth of the year. That's a lot of prattle farming! Quite a lot of incomplete terrain renders, to be sure.

Shamrayev Project

We're getting close to the end of the first pass. I feel like I need a break, but I also recognise that I'm feeling like walking away from a project because it's managed to sneak out of the feel-good zone by slowly accumulating design compromises and bodging the modelling.

Building really complicated things is hard and takes a lot of time and effort. When my patience wears out, I start to bodge things. You might notice that I'm no longer fighting my way out of the "box". This is where you don't work hard enough to hide the underlying primitives. The viewer can sense that you created simple forms and made some changes. Really good models look real, they look manufactured and don't betray that they started life as a cube.

Today is not a day to put my tools down. Let's get this thing finished. Once finished, it can be undone, repaired, changed, or, ultimately, discarded. 

Missing shield

Last thing yesterday, I was going to add some more detailing and think about what to do next. Something didn't look right... I have turned off the shield element. Nope! Turned out that I'd accidentally deleted it. Going back to the previous scene version is a quick fix, except that it isn't, because it was the last thing that I built. Oh hum!

So, this is nature's way of telling me, "Now do it properly!" The plan was to make the shield look lightweight but complex. I'd just sculpted a big block. This time, we'll build a complex sub-assembly, then array the thing into existence.

New shield starting point. Engineering mess

The engineering section is a visual mess, but I like it. What does it need to make it pass the test while staying messy?

I need to better sell the idea that those cylinders are plug-in tanks. I could incorporate ribbing into the connector elements to make them stand out from the main tank. I could add more elements to the retaining rings that show where the tanks connect to the engineering section. These contribute to the mess, but in doing so, they look like engineering....

V-Tanks (Volatiles)

Shield Array and Bigg A$$ thruster

These are not the most difficult elements; you can hide in the complexity. This should be easy! [Narrator: famous...last...words...]

• Don't overdo it.
• Think Big:Medium:Small just within this separate part.
• The shield shouldn't look like a solid mass, but it should have parts that make sense, such as water/ice bags and some plating.

I may post an update later if progress runs smoothly.

Centum Nonaginta Novem

 I just spotted that my next post will break the 200-in-a-year barrier. Wow! Blender is important to me, and that's evidence if it were needed.

Should I be coming up with some New Year's resolutions? Bah, they don't work except that it's always good to be reflective on where you have been, what you have accomplished, or not, and where you are going. People should not limit this kind of thinking to the first few days of a new year.

1. Sell more on Superhivemarket. Target: end of Feb 2026. I'll be paying for my website then, which will be a lot more than the money I made from the store last year. 

2. Improve things that go beyond Blender. Better attention to detail, more patience. Do more sketching. Those sorts of things.

3. More technical knowledge: Geo-nodes, rigging, master UVs (mwahha hahha hahah -- crazy laugh) 

Now I'm getting silly.

Do more training material. I've got the HardOps course to do. I stopped it because the first lesson was causing system crashes. Very off-putting, that is.

Shamrayev Project

Sails!

Nice! Daedalus-effect propulsion. [waves hands]

I liked how the sails were rebuilt. If there was one negative comment, it's that they now look heavy and carry more visual weight than I had planned. That said, this works, given that they are a kind of thruster system; they are not catching the sun's magnetic field, like actual sails, so we'll live with it.

Engineering

The next significant effort is to finish the engineering section.

First thing to do: ditch the ball tanks. This space vehicle is looking phallic enough without being equipped with balls. Instead, we'll go with a series of plug-in capsules. Tanks of volatiles

Engineering!

Thoughts on what's needed

Time to think about that shield disk. It's designed to shield the front of the ship from radiation produced by the primary propulsion system and is supposed to be a high-tech, lightweight substitute for a giant block of lead. It may have bags of water/ice inside. The fabric elements always look interesting, but they're costly in terms of rendering resources.

The plug-in tanks are kept simple, with only tiny surface elements and machinery in their end-cap recesses.

Those struts that extend from the disk to support the rear sail struts need to be engineered as an element. Let's see what cross-bracing struts do.

The cable mast should come out of this section instead of the shield disk. I'll make it bigger and more structurally complex.

Stability is still a problem with TrueSKY 3 and Blender 5.x. That said, yesterday I was able to reproduce a CUDA error with the Shamrayev model, though it didn't repeat after a restart.

I did a test of Blender 4.5 and True SKY2. Scatters are not a problem! As soon as I move back to Blender 5 and True SKY 3, its CUDA errors all the way.


I will test moving back to pure CUDA instead of Nvidia's OPTIX drivers.

Shamrayev Project: Critique deuxième partie

 I did a lot of work on those sails yesterday. Near the end, I had a sudden rush of blood to the head and created that very off-the-cuff angled arrangement. I liked that it wasn't just a flat plane, and the structural framing was pretty cool in places, but it just wasn't looking good.

Maybe I angled the sails in the wrong direction?

It's okay to respond to a sudden idea and go in a new direction, but don't be shackled to the idea. Here, I put a lot of effort into the delicate structural elements around the sails, all of which will be binned if I change this. But it isn't right. It must be changed.

What next?

Double sails look better balanced but more uniform.

Angled. What about doubled, mirrored, AND angled?

Better!

That feels like a "have your cake and eat it" moment; adding visual interest and engineering vibes without the overall effect being discordant and visually messy. I need to watch how the sails converge. I'll look at building an internal framework for the sails.

Progress!

I'll tidy everything up and then move onto the engineering section.

Shamrayev Project: Sailing along

 
I've some sails in place. Are they sails, really? The Daedalus effect turns electrical energy into thrust, so it's part of the ship's control and propulsion.

I'll have to wait and see how this double-sail design makes me feel later. It's more interesting looking, but it may be very odd-looking. It was very spur-of-the-moment as I placed the sail pieces. I'm struggling to select objects in the viewport and worry that I've some UI configuration in place that is tripping me up.

Boxing Day

 It seems like the family has decided to take a break from festivities to crawl into our respective safe spaces; Clara is doing her big jigsaws and listening to audiobooks. The boys are gaming, and I'm modelling in Blender while listening to piano covers of the Dune film score on YouTube. Good times!

Project Shamrayev is dusted off

It's been two weeks since I touched it. I'm finding it hard going but worthwhile.

More work on the command section after attempting, failing, and resetting the changes I made to engineering.

Weekend Reflections

 We're soon going to be getting very busy with Christmas. There's talk of decorating Leo's bedroom before the holiday. It's only me doing the talking, though. I have four more days of work, which should mean lots of Blender time, but I should take a break.

Sparrow project:

I need to create some more landscape concepts. Drew, the director, wants to see more dramatic and more extraterrestrial terrain. I think we're going in a bit lower, which should make it easier to pull off from a viewing distance, but we'll need to account more closely for surface details.

The other landscape artists shared some valuable insights into Geo-Scatter's masking system. Apparently, using Bezier curves to cull scatters is not efficient because it still includes the full scatter in the pipeline, and then removes things under the mask. I've not seen anything documented about their masking mechanics, but Gabe says this comes from Maarten Nauta, so I should definitely take note. Actually, I should seek out Maarten's free YouTube content. Gabe is on his Patreon, so he probably gets 75% more of Maarten's genius leakage. 

Big terrains!! Drew wants the peaks more jagged.

Blender School

I quickly ran through the introduction to Matplus, the Substance Painter-like/lite implementation for a layer-based material creation tool. It's limited to Blender 4.5, and I only have it installed on my secondary machine, which does materials/supporting tasks. Nice! It wasn't wildly complex, and it's definitely inspired by Substance Painter's workflow. You must have really good UVs on your models. You start by baking out the PBR maps that you need. You can apply the layers using various masks and painting options. It is nowhere near as feature-rich or as performant as Substance Painter, but it's in its early days, and it's right inside Blender, so there's no need to swap between them all the time.

I must, must, must:

• Finish the environmental design course.
• Complete the Hard OPs course from the Blender Bros, which has gathered dust for a year.
• Prepare for a purge and reinstallation of Blender when 5.0.1 drops next week.

So key things to remember:

Matplus is a tool that you used in a self-contained workflow. You prep your model, get the UVs in good shape, and then go off and create your materials. Once you are happy, you export the PBR maps, which are applied like any others. If you need to iterate, return to the MatPlus project and repeat the steps. So Matplus is not an extension of Blender's own material/shader creation. 

One is a MatPlus project, the other has PBR map outputs from the project.

CG Characters

This time last year, I downloaded a free sample from CG Characters, a team that was creating really cheap, mid-quality human scans. Their library contained a wild array of genre figures in cool poses. I was tempted to get the set but forgot about it. Well, I hunted them down to see if their library has grown since then. Naughty tinkers have not grown their library as promised; they have a second library that is focused on science fiction characters, available both in various poses and as a T-posed animatable character. Not rigged, though. These figures look slightly better in terms of capture, and their costumes are certainly better -- still a bit cos-play, but the details are more than good enough for background figures.

Not super detailed, but great for medium to far shots

Alexa in her various action poses.

Shamrayev Project

Critique time!

It's dawn on a Sunday morning. The house is quiet, and I'm two coffees down. Lets do some crit!

I stopped work on it last night because it felt like I was tired and letting compromises creep in. A fog had dropped on my critical faculties, and I was at that stage when my modelling carried on by itself, without enough care for design or build quality. A perfect time to stand back, reflect, and take a look with a fresh eye.

So, actually, I'm still happy with the overall effort. There are some places where more care and some rebuilding are needed, but not too much. How is the 70-30 rule applied? Well, it's slightly off, but not enough to worry about. There are areas where the ship is not too cluttered, where the details are already in the realm of the small. So the Big:Medium:Small approach also isn't being applied perfectly, but it's better than it usually is, for sure.

There's no wild rebuild required, just lots of refinement. The next significant effort will be the engineering section. I originally planned for exposed detailing and pines to go behind the shield, but I have decided that some of it will go in front and help pipe up those water tanks. The tanks could become a torus. Are the "ball" tanks too testicular? I still want to include a fold-away mechanism, but I'll not worry about that during this initial design pass.

More later!

Shamrayev Project: Big to Medium.

 Progress report on the Shamrayev. It's holding on by its fingernails. The muscle memory is so strong and so hard to resist. I build something and automatically have the urge to noodle out nurnies and greebling. It always adds up to fine details that don't stay coherent and nearly always clutter ineffectively.

Be cautious. Be consistent. Waiting until the final step to decide where to add the tiny details. Mostly. There are a few elements where I stepped too far, but not too far. The hanger doors are verging in small details, but I have forgiven myself. The Comms module at the front briefly went into small detail, until I deleted it and started again.

I decided that the mission capsules are too sticky-outy and relegated them to a more enclosed space that is flush with the command section.

 

The Comms module looked interesting, but every time I added something to it, it ended up messy. I elected to go simpler.

Three hanger doors built. The hanger is hollow and will be dressed out with two shuttles and a chargo handler drone. 

Next: Run down the whole ship and ensure that I'm happy with all the big shapes. There needs to be some breakup, here and there. A big radar dish assembly somewhere near the comms module. I may add some cargo canisters in the spaces between the mission pods, hanging on racks. Stuff like that.

Shamrayev Project: Block-out finale

 I'm happy with the overall proportions, but the "big" (big:medium:small) details, such as the shapes of the command module, propulsion until, et al are still to be finalised.

I'm seriously considering adding a fold-in mechanism for the sails. It really should not be too hard. I have a Rigify course that mainly covers using the free rigging addon for humans, but it should refresh my memory on how bones and armatures work.

First, I'll look at the command section. It's going to carry a lot of the detail of the front of the ship, which is going to limit the amount of detail of the hab module section.

This makes me think that the hab modules won't be as padded/inflated as earlier sketches suggest. There are padded plates, but they are really in the fine details.

I think I need more sketching before I progress.