I've been poorly - so not much Blender time.

Leo wanted to make a table. I added the lamp to add a bit of interest.

I've fallen out of love with the overall feel of the current Fire Shark. I may give it one final tweak-to-save attempt.

PBR texture test. What's with the black areas? Possibly artifacts from the normal map.

Rocks on a landscape.

Tested an approach to realistic space scenes. Nice, but not nearly as nice as the results shown in the tutorial.

A Ziggurat doodle, showing the use of noise displacement on the left-hand side.

Landscape Therapy

I couldn't face Fireshark, I just didn't have the critical faculties for stripping back and restarting something. I created a few reasonably sized landscape meshes.

Pre-mesh-smoothed.

Fireshark Progress, maybe

Last night I continued the Fireshark build. Some progress works, while other elements fall down the old pit of adding detail without enough thought to the overall flow. You get lots of surface detail but it looks cobbled together and not unified.

Areas like the winglet root, where lots of elements flow, but almost nothing lines up.

The lower components were built really quickly just so I could see how the cabin looks on a perch. Tonight, I will probably rebuild all of those parts, if not more. Hell, I still want to start from scratch, but I think, at this point, I need to just complete what we have and then decide about restarting.

The bigger part of these models is temporary blocking, so I can see what it will look like.

A weekend tonked with many tinkers

A Storm

A weekend of stormy weather resulted in the most stay-at-home weekend in ages. This translated into a fair bit of gaming -- resulting in the death of my Level 25 Division 2 Hard-core character (Boo!), although quite a lot more Blender work got done afterward.

I find landscape generation therapeutic. I'm doing too much of it.

I love building giant landscapes, but they don't hold up very well to close up view.

A mesh with more sensible dimensions. 

I did a silly thing. I created a moderate mesh, then applied the subdivision surface modifier for at-render-time smoothing. The result swallowed up about 6GB and crashed Blender before the render even started. I think I just found my very first 32GB system memory use case.

(Saturday) Leo asked if he could help me build a model. So we built a chair! I had a bit of fun with the textures, but the model took about 3 minutes.

(Sunday) Flush from Saturday's success, Leo and I built a table.

I love that Leo has taken an interest in 3D modelling. He's more artistically included than Noah, although his 4-year-old hands don't lend themselves to Blender's keyboard shortcuts. I ended up pressing the shift and ctrl buttons for the basic operations.

Fireshark version....well quite a few.

Rough lashup of the Fireshark.

A rough model can make for a good template for sketching, getting details designed quickly.

Project ideas are now stacking up, but I am determined to build the Fireshark and not move on to something easier. The reason I've failed, so far, is that I reject all my efforts after an hour of modelling -- because bad modelling creeps in by then.

Last month's rejected effort, with a scaled-up cabin. Looks cool but I have rejected the long-nose design.

The last thing on Sunday night, the building begins again.

Some mesh errors resulted in artifacts when I applied the solidify modifier to the main body.

Fallow week

Some more landscape modelling work from the beginning of the week.

Scatchbuilt in World Creator

Very pleasing and natural-looking erosion patterns

I love the creative freedom that World Creator 1 provides. More about World Creator, although they are currently selling the version 2, which I will eventually buy.

Not much done in nearly a week

I've spent the last couple of nights gaining. Rainbow Six and The Division 2. It's been grand but its time to get back to work.


I need focus, and a sense of completing a set task, a project. I need to make the Fireshark space fighter that project. The Fireshark is a classic hard surface vehicular project, not too big, but plenty of challenges.

Tonight, I'm out catching up with an old friend, but I should get an hour to do some drawing work to hammer down the basic design.

I need to stop myself from noodling the design too much. Noodling, the act of improvised design, adding new elements and pushing a design into unknown areas is really valuable and a lot of fun, but for me, the result always becomes overwrought and too far removed from the design inception that it feels like I've failed. I need a really strong blueprint to follow.

Back in the mountains

Last night I ended up mucking around with World Creator, spending some more time using its powerful landscaping tools. I love adding complex erosion patterns to things!

Small landscape file. Nice erosion patterns but not detailed enough for viewing close-up.

Simple shader 

A second hand made landscape.

I realise now that the odd blurring is part of the river filtering. There are lessons writ in these rough renders.

Eevee video renders are so freaking fast! This one was done in less time than it took to make a cup of tea.

Tonight, back to school, back to something more buildy.

Quick touch

I was too tired to get much done with Blender, last night. I'd attended a night walk with my eldest son and his Beavers group.

Quickly whipped-up interior scene

Watch this space!

Weekend efforts

Boolean-modified cube mirrored and repeated.

The weekend offered some time for Blender training. I watched a number of episodes of my Hard Surface Modelling course, which is great. I realise now that I need to repeat watching followed by lots of hands-on practice.

I made a start with the Boolean approach to modelling. It's so powerful but just tends to leave me with a horrible mess. The training videos, while they didn't give me an instant fix, they have left with a much better understanding of what pitfalls to avoid.

 However, Saturday's efforts to reboot the Fire Shark model got nowhere. Here is how it tends to go: I make a start, I make promising progress. After an hour I'm already struggling with bad topology, constrained by shading artifacts and or just feeling like I've not improved on the existing attempt, which is passable, mostly.

Simple Stools. 

More Boolean play.

For the rest of the weekend, I tended to do more quick exercises.

Tested if I remembered how to make simple stones. I overdid the smoothing for boulders but liked the quick results.

A vast landscape mesh, coming in at about 300MB. Really, too big as you can't get all the polygons into view.

Last thing on Sunday, I built a huge landscape mesh, using World Creator 1, which I bought in a Steam sales a few years ago, but never really made use of it.

Blender started to chug, but then when I realised how big this model is, I was quietly impressed by the cycles render engine performance. Thanks to Hardware CUDA support and some denoise filter work.

Fireshark Space Fighter - but not right

Started off okay but It's lost the sleek rod form, looking instead like a car.

Friday night, I had another stab and it got a lot closer. I've not rejected this one yet, but we'll see how I feel about it over the weekend.

Another stab

Brutalist platforms and stairs.

A rough layout

A bit more architectural

Staircases and walkways are just a little too narrow.

Week beginnings

Another stab at the gladiator tower. It got a bit too modern, but it was fun to build. Having kept the quads intact, the mess UV. Keeping the quads flowing over the mesh made UV work without the usual mess to clean up. I picked random concrete textures, used a simple shader mixer and a filter map.

Overall, a good couple of hours of play.

The new ruins

A little overwrought and lacking in clear function, but easy and fun to build.

eff

Screenshot of Blender in action