Not enough. Not nearly enough

Weekend

I had a weekend looking after the boys, while Clara worked night shifts. Sometimes I get to indulge myself but this weekend I never really got focused enough to progress much 3D learning.

Noah woke up at 5:20am, on Saturday. He went downstairs to watch youtube videos, which got me up. Unable to get back to sleep, I decided to crank up Blender and do some messing about.

Fighting towers mk2 -- too far apart!

As often happens, in the second attempt at something, you manage to dodge the mistakes of the first attempt, but you also end up losing something, a quality that you only notice after you have invested quite a bit of time. Attempt three pays for all! I'll try again, next week.

Fireshark

Rough sketch of the Fireshark Mk2 - Consortium Multirole Fighter

Blender screenshot

I made a tentative start on the Fireshark space fighter on Sunday evening. By tentative, I mean that I probably made about 4 starts, but quickly rejected the mode early on. I decided that I needed a stronger starting position - based on more precise sketches.


I must learn to get the basic shape right before making the detail cuts that break up the quads. I have HardOPS, which is a powerful set of workflows that use intelligent beveling to manage a non-destructive boolean workflow. I feel that I need to nail down the basics before I go down that rabbit hole.


The design is a bit stubby, I want the longer hose back. Although the side stubs are looking better than the sketch, they might make the winglets look a bit funny though. Definitely work-in-progress.

Probably rejected cabin design.

Light of day

Cassero Fighting towers - v1

Last night I followed a brief tutorial on using HDR lighting. I remember using HDR in trueSpace 6 and loving the rich and lifelike quality it brought to a scene, although its use guaranteed a lot of waiting around.

The scene is of a mythical gladiatorial arena, composed of interconnected towers with unguarded staircases running along the outside walls. A scary place to wander, even before sword-wielding maniacs start chasing you.

Lessons learned: I don't really understand HDR. Some tutorials impart knowledge that you can use to make creative decisions. Other tutorials are a set of steps that you try to follow faithfully, without really knowing what you are doing. This was definitely the latter. I was extremely disappointed that the scene resulted in CUDA errors, forcing me to render via CPU.

I'll complete a write-up of the HDR workflow. I may check out a couple more tutorials to see if there are other approaches. Everyone is so in love with Eevee, but I prefer the qualities of Cycles for final output.

A shout out to the newly integrated denoiser filter -- applied here to reduce the grain that cycles render often produce. The filter drops into the compositor so it applies post-render and produces great results in most situations.

Tonight

I'll return to the Fireshark when I have nailed down the design through more drawing work. First, I'll do a more detailed version of the towers.

Tinkering in a sea of tink

Last night

Some stairs that don't go anywhere.

Stairway scene

A quick video of a little staircase model. I never got into animation and struggle. I need to watch some tutorials and complete some basic exercises.



Eevee landscape vs Cycles.



Here are the mountains (relief map) of Kent. Time to render was about 2 seconds.



Same scene in Cycles. Significantly longer render time. Looking a lot less washed out but the lighting is not really being implemented properly.

Next

I decided that I need a project. You can never fail if your aim is to tinker. You need failure to be an option or you don't really know if you succeeded. So, I am going to rebuild my Fireshark space fighter, from 20-odd years ago.

The sleeper must awaken! *big yawn*

It's hard to believe that I've been tinkering with Blender for so long. Alas, I have failed in my promise to invest and become truly proficient. That is, until now.

In 2020, this changes. Commitment renewed!

I need a plan, some real goals. I have training materials aplenty. The wealth of excellent free Youtube content ensures that anyone willing to put in time and effort has a vast amount of demonstrated expertise on tap. I've also got some really good paid-for training. Including a 2.8-specific course on Udemy (Blender 2.8 The complete guide from beginner to pro) and through Creativeshrimp.

I'm going to blow the dust off of this blog because it's really useful to record my thoughts, track progress or current problems.

Multiple iterations of mirror turned this simple frame into a huge lattice

I started my own "cute room" diorama. Also available in isometric view.

Note to me

It's important to keep plugging away. Having time away from modelling makes the return harder until you can't face making that climb again, really getting to grips with 20 different tools that would have made your last effort so much easier.

Notebooks

I'm scribbling what I learn down in a (paper) notebook. I hope that this will help to cement what I learn and make it easier to relearn when I forget a particular thing.

Use it daily

Having 10 minutes of hands-on time helps. Like any kind of practice regime, you get out what you put in, and you tend to get out more when you make practice regular.

Keep watching

Tutorials give you a chance to learn different/better workflows. They can give you insights beyond how Blender works. You can jump-start expertise by seeing how more experienced and more talented users strut their stuff.

2.8 RC: It's on!

Blender 2.8 has finally ready for release, it's first release candidate arrived last week. It'd been saying for a while that once 2.8 arrived, I would return to the world of 3D modelling creativity. And so I have.

My feelings from the first few hours:


The difference between 2.79 and 2.8 is vast. Development on 2.8 has been ongoing for nearly half a decade, so this really is a whole new version of Blender. Blender founder, Ton Roosendaal has said that he felt that shifting the number to 3.0 would have felt dishonest, or at least a breach of trust. It's a noble attitude, although what the hell can they deliver to justify the jump to 3.0 after refreshing and updating almost everything?

Some very foundational interactions have been changed, the most obvious is the shift to left-click selection, a complete reversal on the previous default. Many users have argued against the change but I remember two times I downloaded Blender to try out and gave up after 5 minutes because I didn't know it reversed the left-click/right-click convention used by EVERY OTHER Windows application. The UI refresh is outstanding - I used to do a lot of mucking around, creating customer layouts, I no longer feel the need to as there are built-in layouts that provided obvious UI modifications for working on a particular area, such as UV editing.

I got a bit frustrated because I couldn't add an array around a fixed point of rotation -- which I soon realised was a flashback to 3DS Max. The solution was only a Youtube tutorial away, although Blender makes the job fairly convoluted.

More soon!

Simple Planets

I've finally done some more Blender work, inspired by the purchase of a course of tutorials, all about space. See Space VFX by creative shrimp.

The following outputs were produced after watching and mostly following the first tutorial on how to create a simple planet.

I made a few changes to the workflow which I thought would improve things, only to have my changes derail the tutorial about half way through. I considered the results still good enough to keep --- they incorporate some really clever touches that I would never have worked out for myself.

The planet texture consists of two ground maps supported by a third masking layer map.

WIP: Hydrospanner Repair Trolley

A somewhat left-to-gather-dust mini project.

Traveller Type-S Scout

Blowing the dust from Blender while putting the latest version 2.75 through its paces.

A change of heart about Photoshop plugins

Still learning what keys to press

I'm still learning shortcuts, critical ones too -- Cntl+Up Arrow for going full screen on your current view. I can't believe I battled on without learning that one for so long. I've been reminded of this little tool on Facebook's Blender group:
http://waldobronchart.github.io/ShortcutMapper/#Blender  This too: http://download.blender.org/documentation/BlenderHotkeyReference.pdf

Digital Heavens cosmic pack 3 

I'm not very keen on quick plugin solutions because they can dull my artistic senses - if you use Photoshop then you'll have had that experience of seeing someone's work and immediately recognising the work of a filter, probably because it was applied with little or no tweaking -- it just kills the work for you. I held off buying Cosmic Pack 3 product from Digital Heavens because of this fear - that if I use cosmic pack 3 outputs in my work anyone familiar with the product will very likely recognise that I used it to shortcut the creative journey.

..and that's when I bought it anyway

Well, the lack of time that I have to spend being creative has forced me into a change of mind - I wanted to create some more planet maps but realised that I could spend a week just making a few maps without getting any actual work done. Not to mention that you can use these off-the-shelf tools as a starting point and make sure that you don't finish until the output is refined enough that it doesn't look like other example Cosmic Pack work.

Blender output using Cosmic Pack 3 starfield and planet maps.

I only had time to blindly run through a quick planet creation, there were some quirks that I need to research as I expected prompts for modifying masks and layer qualities, such as scale, however, I am instantly impressed. I'm seeing Cosmic Pack 3 more as an extended palette for space scenery and less like an stamp-on solution for generic space backgrounds.

Still blending...

Just to be clear, the lack of posts isn't because I stopped working with Blender -- if anything I've become more focused since the last update, spending a  lot of time going back and improving work, tackling stuff that I've previously hated -- specifically UV mapping and texture mapping. 

Suffering for Suffren

I completed my build of the 2300AD star ship IFV Bassompiere - a Suffren-class cruiser and was happy enough with the results that I decided that it was going to get the full texture mapping treatment. That took ages! I restarted the process about three times, but the underlying workflow is steady and pretty easy - thanks to the regular forms that make up the model.

Boxing out the basic form - getting the proportions right. This was about the fourth attempt.

The Suffren has a really simple form. Getting a lot of detail onto those flat surfaces helps break up the form and give the viewer a better sense of scale.

Time to paint it up. Each section had its UV exported then applied as a mesh which gives an interesting 'look' in its own right. I did this stage three times, each time trying to optimize how the meshes unwrapped.

Texture mapping underway. With a good UV setup texture mapping gets a lot easier. I've spent years getting nowhere with mapping because of building out of lots of unconnected meshes. Finally getting somewhere!

Model -almost finished, here. Some glowing lights need to be added. The three Landers attached at the back.

For a brief animation I put together this wrap-around-a-globe background image, based on the Earth scene I downloaded from Blender Swap. This is a sample of a 10,000 by 8,000 render - the biggest I've ever done by a long long shot. Suddenly I realise why all my environmental backgrounds have failed in the past -- my background images were about one tenth of the size required to avoid horrible artefacts from appearing.

Video

So it struck me that I have never touched anything to do with animation. Quite common with me. Animation is hard and it's only done when you have models worthy of the great effort. I don't often get past texture mapping...

Well I thought I'd lay in some keyframes and see how Blender handles the basics. Not much to see - just a jolly big landscape that I knocked together in 5 minutes using an existing height map.