JUUUUUUUUUNE

 Shout-out to the BBC sitcom from my childhood, Terry & June. Many, if not most, episodes would end with hapless middle-aged husband, Terry, in some comedic high-speed crisis calling out for his wife, "JUUUUUUUUUNE".



So it goes that hapless middle-aged Blender user, me, calls out that we have already arrived at the Middlemonth (t.m). Where does the time go? I can never find it, except in my failing memory.

I'm going to make Monday mornings my Start of the Week report, where I plan what I'll commit to and deliver on the upcoming week. Just like work! Maybe I should do a Start of Month too, but let's learn to crawl before we run a Marathon.

Scene 002

Progress is being made slowly. But it is progress! I'm still not satisfied with the materials, as they're being applied. Let's do a proper evaluation, comparing what we've got with what we want. They think about what needs to be done to bridge the gap. The effort has felt too much about vibes and feelings. "Do I like this?" doesn't get you onto the next step.

We potentially have a new Environment Design lead. I should compile a list of questions to see if I can extract wisdom from the possible new team leader.

Aim: The material must be completed this week; in fact, dressing should be progressing, if not complete.

Side note: Gabe has been busy finishing an interior environment, so he hasn't produced his "challenge" terrain using Gaea. I eagerly await his challenge!

Superhivemarket Trades

I need to start making money on the Superhivemarket Store. The website I set up is going to cost me another lump sum shortly. It will cost much more than I earned from the product I created. I need to make way more products!

Things I can make:

Terrains: This time, I'd create actual baked scenes rather than just displacement maps. 

Space vehicles: I can make some cool ones. I think that one loosely based on Project Hail Mary would sell quite well. 

Planet: I can create giant planet maps. I could create a pack of 5-6 for £10

The aim this week is to develop a plan, not to rush into production. The aim should be to deliver something by the end of June.

Blender School

I think I need to start revising and push to complete more training on new things. I've forgotten most of what I learned about HardOps, although I think it would come back quickly.

I've not used Fluent or Random Flow in over a year. They're a mystery to me now. This is why writing down new procedures is so important to me; it serves as a quick memory aid, as opposed to redoing the work, which takes longer and often goes wrong. A case in point, though. The use of Render layers, which I thought I'd effectively recorded in a post, got me very stuck. I missed some critical element that seemed to reset asset visibility when shifting between layers.

Photography

I've had a small dip in productivity because I have been making use of the great weather, getting out and taking lots of photographs. So much so that I am glancing sideways at new cameras. <Slaps own wrist>

Loxley Valley from High Riggs

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.

Pretty shocking!

 

Yesterday, just before I headed to work, I received an email from Superhive informing me that my account had been restricted, and that I needed to verify my identity. I was in a rush and wanted to resolve the issue before leaving. So I checked the email was legit—it was. It came through Superhive. 



However, my spider sense was tingling. The language in the email wasn't quite right. The link formatting was inconsistent with everything else they'd ever sent me. I didn't even read the security warning, which is telling you this is not a legitimate email.

I clicked on the link...and.. oh gawd. 

That URL is a fire alarm. The dressing isn't terrible. The support chat window is reassuring but also not quite right.

So the email looks to have been sent through Superhive from a compromised seller's account and is dressed up to look like it came directly from Superhive. I messaged support through the website's main link, and received a reply very quickly that told me this is a scam and that prompt action has been taken to prevent the rogue account from sending any more messages. Not great but not terrible. Some kind of text scanning on the seller's emails might be in order, as they'd quickly identify suspect URLs. That linked page is under the top-level domain intended for clothes and fashion vendors?!


Terrains

Because I am addicted to the sculpting steps. I really need to use some of the scatter tools and MOVE ON.

New cliff assets. I spent so much money in the sale.

Sculpted steps. About 5 biome masks made this one crashy (in World Creator)

Details: nice. Too washed out.

Final hours of the Superhive Black Friday Sale... Spend Moah?!

 So I did pick up MatPlus, the layer-based material system that gives Blender a built-in Substance Painter-like functionality. Expensive! But it looks like it's from a reputable and dedicated provider.  I installed it, and found out that it doesn't yet support Blender 5. Erm, no worries. I installed it with Blender 4.5. Still not working. I tested and toyed with it until I was pretty sure this was probably me having missed a prerequisite or an installation step.

I raised the issue on their Discord, providing all the information they might need—and a few hours later, they gave me a workaround (leave the project root directory blank) and promised a fix would be in the next release. Pretty good experience.

The tool looks really good, but I will watch a few tutorials first. I also need to get my UV unwrapping a lot better, which is a sign that my modelling is a bit slapdash.

A better UV unwrap tool may be required. Strokes chin and looks at UVFlow's sale price...

Work for the rest of the week:

• Updates to the next previs service road
• More learning: MatPlus test before I forget I have it and never learn to use it. 
• Practice with TrueSky 3. Some space scenes?

A bigger project for the near future

 While at work yesterday, I thought about the first 3D spaceship that I built. It was part of my undergraduate degree course, using Microstation. That's about 33 years ago?! It would be cool to do a rebuild in Blender 5? I actually did a reasonable rebuild a few years ago (2018?! yikes that long ago), but I had no idea how to light and stage it, so all the renders looked bad.

2018 build

What I would do differently. EVERYTHING.

Firstly, I did my old and bad trick of building everything to its fine-detailed final quality without doing a proper Big:Medium:Small blockout. 

There are some nice detail elements, but the forward section looks more Sci-Fi compared to the central part of the ship, which looks like hard science fiction. I would really sweat the engineering details. The superstructure frame doesn't look structural, like an actual load-bearing system. 

I'd build to a much tighter and finer level of detail, using what I learned from the more recent ship projects:

Bayern build. 2300AD game ship: not my design

Bayern used the Big:Medium:Small approach, and I think it was to scale.

Orbital Elements warship. Needed a bit more work, but I would change a lot now.

So the Ukrainian Space Navy Courier, Igor Shamrayev, is coming soon.

Gunship: first steps

Easter Sunday.

We have family visiting, and Clara is sleeping off a night shift, so I'll be out all day. 

Gunship progress...not much

Into the panels too soon. 

A first run at the panelling. I started too soon. I should have been working on a second level of detail that changes how lines flow on the base model. Panelling and greebles can break up straight lines, but it's better to have more complexity in the blocked-out mesh.

I'm going to experiment with the underlying model and restart the panelling. The mesh's topology has a lot of tapering, which means that any panelling that you pull out of the mesh will flow at angles. It results in panels and blocks that are all angled, when it would be better to have them rectangular or with straight lines.

Planning for another Blender Market (Superhive) product

 It's going to be a small-scale Star Wars-themed ship: a Correlian Gunship, a hyperspace-capable, heavily armoured escort ship that would protect bulk transporters from pirates.

GS-94 Osprey - Light Escort Gunship


Key design elements:

Quad turret arrangement and a look that tells you this thing can take some punishment. So, I'm moving away from the sleeker, speedier-looking designs. As a defender, this doesn't need speed as it will stay close to the ship it protects. I'll include a few Millennium Falcon visual cues. I may recreate the Falcon's guns and hull plate styling. Although I won't dangle the design too close to Disney IP, as I'd like to avoid any Imperial entanglements... 😆

Leading contender

Sleeker...maybe

Space tank. Earlier design.

Next Step. A more refined illustration.

Always be landscaping!

I intend to add bonus terrains and a tutorial video to my terrain pack. This is a contender.

Back to work, back to Blender productivity

Today

Back to the job. Looking forward to it, at least a bit. 

This week

I really need to get a new product into Blender Market (now called Superhive). From the top of my head:

• Traveller ships, suitable for 3d printing...
• A Star Wars style ship
• A collection of photogrammetry assets
• Simple and very cheap scene assets (science fiction or real-life objects?)
• A rigged robot
• More Orbital Elements stuff (or finishing off the stuff I already made)

Blender Training:

• Complete the CG Cookie training courses
• Hard Ops course
• Relearn Character Creator
• Practice some of the forgotten core add-ons (PBR Extreme, for example)

Instability

I had a series of consistent crashes with True-Terrain 5. I raised a bug. 

It seemed to be associated with a particular height map. I've had crashes on other scenes, but not consistently and less often.

A nice start. Some artefacts on the tree cards. Needs more transparency layers, I guess.

More TT5 testing. Okay, here!

Doodle scene. Sanctus materials.