Thursday runtime/funtime

 I did an early run this morning. I was at the Morrisons supermarket at Hillsborough for its opening at 7am. I felt great, although I had to walk back to avoid damaging the stuff I'd bought, which included some glass cooking oil bottles. I felt great at 8, fine at 9, but by the time I was half an hour into my shift at 2, I felt like...a nap.

Lesson: Don't go for the first run in months/years and not expect some serious energy-level troughs through the rest of the day.

I was happier with the direction my terrain tests were taking, but not quite there yet. I will do another final test tomorrow, keeping the rises to a minimum and making the canyon channels a bit deeper and longer. The latest idea is to create a repeatable plate that can be instanced a few times to give the impression of a super-detailed area.

The terrain that I last rejected was still quite cool, so I had some fun dressing it.

High contrast, big rabbit

Foggy drama with bunting

Bunting for the bunny god!

Tomorrow: That training I was supposed to do. I'll do an hour or two.

Finish something: Hmm, tricky. This piece is finished; it's a quick play-around, not a full project. I do itch to build a space vehicle, but I'm too far behind on the Halo terrain efforts.

It never rains but it ....snow forecast

 We're heading towards Winter's end, but we might not have seen the last of the ice and snow. In the world of Blender, I got a sudden blast of cold last night, as I realised that my Scene000 needed addon components. I thought it was all node-based and included within the scene. That was the other planet-making solution I used: Cosmo, which was great but has not been maintained by the author and has been removed from Superhivemarket, unless you already bought it.

I'm hoping that we can just absorb the cost of a couple of copies. Hell, I'd buy them myself. However, the director might instead want me to recreate the scene using True SKY3. This is probably achievable, but it's uncertain that it can look as good and finding out might take me a few days of investigation. A bigger investment than the 15 dollars for Geosim...

So my current Raptor project task list:

• Read the latest version of the True SKY 3 Documentation.
• Watch the tutorial videos.
• Do some testing.
• Make a beautiful planet.
  

We will see!

True SKY 3 testing

Minimum

Maximum

Three cloud layers (@ maximum)

On the seventh day...

Take a rest from those terrains, already!

Yesterday I scratched that constant itch. I made me some landscape renders using World Creator and Blender with True Terrain 5.

Horrah!!! A giant terrain under True SKY 3, with a large Geo-Scatter-based scatter! In this case, the scatter is "fake" trees. Alpha scatter uses cards (flat planes) that align with the camera to produce the impression of a vast forest. It gives me confidence about ramping up scatters in scenes.

The next test will be with proper scatter objects, probably on a much smaller terrain.

The latest batch consists of 8x8km terrains. That's big enough for a city. It's the terrain size for a moderate mountain range, as you need about 4km for a mountain.

16x16k resolution gives you a 1GB EXR displacement file and a single mask weighing in at 100+ MB. These are unwieldy and probably too large for most users. You do get lovely detailing, though.

Today?

I need to answer the question of the aerial scene, but that will wait until tomorrow. So...

Shamrayev project: I need to pick it up and move it forward. We're still doing detail modelling, fixing and optimising. I am thinking of using MatPlus, which was just updated to 1.1 for the project. 

Blender School

I need to complete some training -- I'm far behind on this! 

 A new course, purchased on sale. It includes a massive amount of build, UV unwrapping and rigging footage. It has to be a bit less instructive and more like a follow-along YouTube video, but the end results speak for themselves - some very impressive elements! I'm sure I'll learn something.

I need to complete this course by Cov Philips. I was making good progress when I purchased it. 

I will need to start this course again as it's been gathering dust since May 2024. I stopped because I kept getting Blender crashes while following the first few lessons. Hopefully, this issue will no longer apply. HardOPs is still considered the "go to" workflow for serious (seriously sci-fi) hard surface modellers.


Cableator 1.6 is out! (Docs)

Cableator is such a good tool, but I've never fully understood its feature set. I need to read and watch a full run-through. I particularly want to see how the simulation aspect works. 

There's a really good tutorial from Blender Bros, although this is now three years old!

Terrains are treading water

 Yesterday, I ran out of steam. The test renders introduced volumes, and suddenly, every render was taking a long time. I was sitting, looking for distractions while renders happened in my presence.

The ship model was appended from a shared project file. It's pretty nice for a low-poly representation. However, it was linked to animation frames, so that it rendered in a completely different location from where it sat in the viewport. Very strange!

Monster terrain. 64km wide. The reference block is 1000m high

The volumes are underlit and too blocky, but they do the job of selling scale.


Terrains

8k masks look pixelated up close

You get much better masks when you have a 1GB terrain. Go figure!?!

Added effects from True SKY 3 and Photographer 5

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.

The calm before the Christmas storm

 We're back from visiting Clara's dad for a couple of days. It's almost Christmas Eve, and we have a visitor coming: Clara's brother, Chris. So it's all hands on deck; housework, food prep, and buying the last gifts—we're terrible, I know!

Still a little time for Blender.

Terrain sculpting and testing. I've expressed my dissatisfaction to the director about my aerial shot output. I need to construct some rough previs tests that can demonstrate different approaches to the shot.

Separate terrain assets: foreground and background

Big looming peaks in the background

Playing with previously discarded terrains...

 Quick pre-vis terrain animation...

Another concept...still to animate...

Ship drops through the clouds..

True SKY 3 Beta 7

Oh my word, what an improvement!

Improved clouds: Performance, UI changes, and additional cloud presets/types. More to come in the new year.

Christmas is upon us

 Every December, I seemingly stop being able to use a calendar and fall into a state of shock when it gets to about the 20th. I become dimly aware of the need to buy presents and cards and wear woollen jumpers that are tastelessly decorated in fir trees. I've arrived at that festive finding out phase of the month. I imagine that my Blender output will be briefly knocked back for a few days.

Until then...

Yesterday was tedious as heck.

I explored how to reinstall the custom (Quixel Megascan) terrain materials library for use with True Terrain. It really doesn't look like True Assets can place materials directly in True Terrain's selector. I could be wrong, but it's too late now. I spent several hours manually adding the materials. I'll add one more set of materials later, the colour-based palette set for lightweight terrains.

Quixel materials in the True-Terrain menu for the win!

I continue to explore big terrain options for the aerial shot.

32km with a telephoto lens. Shoot long!

I'm thinking that you get more bang for your buck if you shoot with a telephoto, narrow the field of view and bring the distant places closer. This lets you amp up the terrain detail into the distance because camera culling will remove so much of the foreground. I will do a test render with a nearly static camera and a ship flying through the view. 

Instability testing

True SKY 3 has a final update of the year coming on Monday. I'll hold back on testing more until it's in place. No point in testing a version of the product that will be gone before the engineers can look at it. The chaps at TrueVFX are working full pelt! True SKY is their flagship product. Even in early access, they want to make a great impression, which they have.

Happy Blenderversary

December 19th is the day I decided to learn Blender and start this blog! 

Crashes and render failures

 I've been unable to render any Geoscatter-based scenes that use TrueSKY 3. I get the following error all the time:

what is an ERROR Illegal address in CUDA queue copy_from_device (integrator_intersect_shadow integrator_queued_shadow_paths_array)

The AI search tells us is

"a technical error message primarily encountered during GPU rendering in Blender's Cycles render engine. It indicates that the graphics card encountered an invalid memory address while transferring data back from the GPU to the system memory (or within GPU memory), which usually points to a bug in the rendering calculations or an unstable system.

The (integrator_intersect_shadow integrator_queued_shadow_paths_array) portion of the message specifies the exact function within the Cycles source code where the error occurred, often related to ray tracing and shadow path calculations."

Potential Causes and Solutions

The error can stem from scene-specific issues, software configuration, or hardware instability. Common fixes include:

Scene Issues (Ray Calculations):
Limit ray travel: The error often happens if a ray of light "travels to infinity" outside the scene boundaries, causing numerical instability or invalid memory indexing.

A common workaround is to place the entire scene inside a large bounding box (like a cube) to contain all light paths.

Check complex shaders/geometry: Specific elements, such as volumes, complex materials (like Principled BSDF with Adaptive Subdivision), or the Vector Displacement node causing NaN (Not a Number) values, can trigger this crash.

Simplify the scene: The issue might be related to running out of GPU memory (VRAM), which can manifest as an "illegal address" error rather than a clear "out of memory" message.

Try reducing texture resolutions or simplifying geometry.

Software and Driver Configuration:Update/Reinstall Drivers:

Ensure you have the latest stable NVIDIA Studio Drivers installed. A clean installation of the drivers after completely uninstalling the old ones can resolve issues caused by corrupted installs or Windows updates.

Use OptiX instead of CUDA: In Blender's preferences (Edit > Preferences > System > Cycles Render Devices), try selecting OptiX instead of CUDA (or vice versa) if your GPU supports it. Using both simultaneously can cause conflicts.

Disable Open Shading Language (OSL): Turning off OSL in the Render settings has been a fix for some users experiencing this specific error.Hardware and System Stability:

Check GPU Overclocking: Any GPU overclocking (e.g., via MSI Afterburner, Dragon Centre) can make the render process unstable. Disable overclocks and run your GPU at stock speeds.

Monitor GPU usage/memory: Avoid running other GPU-intensive applications (like games or browser tabs) while rendering, as this can cause resource conflicts or run you out of memory.


There have been Python crashes too, and warnings about Maximum Number of Closures Exceeded"

The warning "WARNING Maximum number of closures exceeded: 96 > 64" in Blender's Cycles render engine indicates that a material in your scene is too complex to be compiled by the rendering kernel (usually the GPU). The number 64 is a hard-coded internal limit on the number of shader "closures" (functions or components) that a single material can use simultaneously. Your scene is attempting to use 96.

This is a common limitation when using highly complex or nested shader node groups, especially with the Principled BSDF shader or when using Open Shading Language (OSL).

Died in the night...

Quick test before CUDA errors struck.

My 4090 system was shut down, and I couldn't get it back on. Dayam! Well, after going through the full CMOS reset, it came back. Phew!! Not a nice feeling. I was browsing SCAN's website, looking at the massive cost of a replacement. Glad to kick that can down the road for a bit.

Fingers crossed that this was an aberration. Could I have shut down by accident? I don't think so...

 Work continues

The next previs reworking for Sparrow films is urgent. I'll get it done today.

Skies

Playing with TrueSKY 3 (beta 4). Something quirky is going on. The new system for controlling volume quality might need more tuning, or the clouds might be broken. Richard and Zach are taking a few days off, so we might need to enjoy clear skies for a while. 

UPDATE!

Richard was online and confirmed the issue was caused by the merging in of breaking changes. He's released beta 5 that fixes the issue.

Rock remodelling

Old and new

Stare decisis

 I've struggled to stay motivated to complete the work to fix the service road elements. It's been tedious work compared to playing with TrueSKY 3, but here we are, time to roll up my sleeves and get the damned work finished.

Additional reference photos for the service road biome.

Cov Phillips was right about the value of Google Earth; it is an absolute treasure for environmental art. Granted, 99.8% of its images are captured on roads, but roads go through every sort of biome, so it's not a significant limiter on usefulness.

Novemberender

 On Friday I previewed fixed for the first service area fix. Success! Although I do need to increase the area by about 10%. I think that my dressing is too big and it's taking up more of the road area than the storyboard version.

I also found the scene to be really stuttery. A sure sign that it's too big for the animators. I'm now redoing all the service road cliff assets to make them more efficient and a lot better. I bought some VDB rock brushes so that I can sculpt realistic rock forms onto the rock walls and boulders. It's quite therapeutic!

Stuttery!

I now realise that I need to do more large-scale displacement on the cliff walls before applying rock structure. VDB brushes apply real geometry, so they create real displacement, but you need an enormous number of polygons on the mesh to bring out the lovely quality of rock.

Test rock assets

I decided that it would be more efficient to sculpt the rocks straight into the current placeholder planes rather than pipe up blocks like these. We'll see what this evening's test looks like.

True Sky 3

Oh my word, it's great.

This girl's sky...

Blender School: True Sky 3 (Part 1)

True Sky 2.x was arguably the best Blender addon for creating your own skies. It didn't give you the high detail or complexity of a well-chosen HDRI, but it could generate an animation-ready living sky with a full day/night cycle and some cool volumetrics for fog and atmospherics.

It was fast and flexible, but it lacked a few things, such as more complex multi-layered clouds or a robust way to export an HDRI from its output. From today, those limitations are gone. As its strapline claims, the sky is no longer the limit.

True Sky 3

A quick tour of True-VFX's new addon.

5's alive!

 Yesterday's Internet issues looked like they would scupper all the releases. In the end, everything got released.

Blender 5.0 is now officially released, and I got it installed and braved bringing in 4.5 settings, saving me a considerable amount of time - providing it didn't break Blender. There were a couple of addon failures that got instant resolution:

Meshmachin3 tools and True Sky 2.x were both updated within minutes of installing Blender. All sorted. Phew! True Sky 2 didn't get much use because of the release of a brand-new version... see below.

Other addons may cause problems, but these can be tackled as and when they reveal themselves. Worst case: I'll delete and perform a complete fresh installation. 

True Sky 3 

The Internet disruption only slightly delayed the release. I came home late and purchased it in a bit of a rush. I didn't notice that my discount was accepted, but it wasn't applied, so I'm probably the only person to pay full price on day one. Superhive will hopefully resolve the issue. [Edit: They did, just a few hours later]

Early Test: 3 Cloud layers at 600 samples

What's it like?

First impressions. Oh boy! The evident capabilities of this addon are breathtaking. It's not an incremental update on version 2.0 that adds some improvements here and there; what you get is a completely rebuilt system that changes and improves everything.

Some things to hold in mind as the giddy superlatives fill the air: This is early access. There are some rough edges, some missing elements, and, most significantly to me, after a couple of hours, this is not like True Sky 2, where you turn it on and get a lovely base sky. This gives you a lot more control, and right now, it doesn't offer any defaults, so you have to attend to various settings. It's a shame that there isn't a mode that lets you run the addon in "simple mode", where it outputs to the True Sky 2 default setup. Being a from-the-ground-up rewrite, there's no attempt to read True Sky 2 scenes, so any old scenes that contain True Sky will need to be redone. Early access is what it is. Some things might be technically too difficult or impractical to implement, while other things might be added soon.

This is such a big change and complex... It's not complex; it's parameter-rich. There are so many parameters; there are countless ways to change the sky. Some are very direct and obvious, while others are ambiguous or extremely deep in the maths weeds. It's twenty steps forward, put a gentle push off the edge of a cliff.

I should do an episode of Blender School that performs a deep dive. 

Typical weekend

 Was it a lazy weekend? Well, I didn't do very much. Battlefield 6 was offering double-XP, so it made sense to mindlessly waste all my time on that. But not all my time, really. I actually did some cool things.

I did a lot of scatter practice, as I want to do a really good job on the Blender 5.0 celebration render.

New terrain. Lots and lots of new terrains

Tres dark out there.  It's hard to see the biome test.

I played with GeoScatter's biome system. Biomes are a collection of ground scatter recipes that carefully layer different ground assets to produce an instant environment type. They are too resource-hungry to use on anything other than a tiny area of foreground. 

Biomes in a pot

From now on, I'll use this smallish pot (it's enormous, for a pot, but very small as a terrain) to test complex scatter collections and own-grown biomes.

A dry grass terrain (my own scatter collection)

Arid (Bagapie biome collection)

Customised biome

Customised biome

Another terrain and some of those wonky generative AI assets

This element looks pretty cool. I will generate some complementary elements to form a full Lovecraftian alien temple.

This week

Blender 5.0 Release Candidate

This will set the clock for the full release in the following week, unless something stinky turns up while testing. I will migrate some of my own work to 5.0, although project work, such as the Service Road, must remain on 4.5 LTS.

True Sky 3

Oh boy, this looks absolutely amazing, especially with the added sky physics and support for planets.

Layered clouds and a "projected planetary sphere"

Service Road

Complete the requested changes to the service road elements. Probably a day's work all in all.

Celebration Render

Complete the modelling and texturing of the egg house. Select a terrain and start dressing it. I had trouble testing BagaRiver addon. I might look into it as it looks like a great way to add a nice stream. This might be handled by Nature Generator; I'll consider that, too.