I'm still putting most of my time into writing. Occasionally taking a break to do writing-related models. This is a medium rig from my table-top roleplaying game: Orbital Elements.

Medium Rig

Medium Rig

 

Plant island

Landscape

Orbital Elements - Medium Rig

 I've been writing for most of the week. Completing the world-building chores for Orbital Elements. This evening I took a break to play with Blender. Naturally, the output is a Medium Rig from Orbital Elements.

A work in progress

Rig

A rig is a simple, cheap-to-build and maintain space vehicle. They’re suitable for transporting small payloads between facilities that are both situated in the same locality. Rigs are the space cars and trucks that zip people and packages between orbitals and space-based destinations on or around a planet. Larger rigs can make interplanetary trips, although they’re not the best fit for long-distance travel. Except for the largest rigs, most are intended for no more than a day or two of operation before turning to a dock.

Archology

 

Quick illustration for my table-top roleplaying game: Orbital Elements.

This has an excessive polycount for such a simple illustration. I knew I wouldn't be creating a photo-realistic model, so I just let the mesh density grow. The mass of trees is done using Alpha Tree, an amazing new add-on that lets me create impossibly large forests. Its trick -- a clue in its name, is the use an alpha maps rendered on a plane instead of model meshes.

Busy week of non-Blender stuff

 It's been a busy week. I completed a few outstanding tasks -- haircut, for one.. I handed my work Macbooks into the office, renewed my driving license, and voted in the local election.

I will focus on completing my tabletop role-playing game: Orbital Elements. This will take me away from Blender, but in the end, I'll use Blender for creating art/models and maps. 

Spring Sale!

Blender Market has a sale. I should reign in my spending, but I can get a bigger library of plant assets with a 25% saving. Don't let anyone tell you that sales don't work.

Tree Vegetation - Tree And Plant Animation Library Addon

From the people who brought you Geo-Scatter, a paid-for library of plants and trees. No grasses, though.
These two images are pre-made biomes that you just drop into your scene. Pretty nice!

World Creator just dropped the first beta for their new version. Here are my first test outputs. I had serious problems with digital artifacts and seams, ruining anything complex you tried to export. The jury is still out, I need to do something more complex, but the signs are positive.

Materials and sky using True Sky and True Terrain.

I've been laid off

 
The company I worked for found it necessary to drastically downsize. I was one of the employees selected for redundancy. This absolutely sucks, but you have to hope that better things are coming. 

In the coming weeks I'm likely to have a bit more Blender time, which is good.

Cutter progress:

50-ton Modular Cutter Progress

 

Work-in-progress 

"No, I don't know how we're supposed to get in either."

Traveller 50-ton Modular Cutter

 

I only found this after completing the build below. 10-years earlier!

This old build was done nearly 10-years ago, in 3DS Max. Below is the in-production update.

Cutter nose on

Plating and details

Bug Fixed

 

Blender 3.5.1 fixes some bugs

As per usual, I think the latest release will fix my instability issues. It never does, maybe because they are caused by add-ons or hardware.

Sanctus update

Another big update for Sanctus procedural materials. Pretty cool!

Scan table update

Scan table scale test -- with subject

 

Borked it. Fixed it

 I tried to install Renderman for Blender. There's an issue where the add-on element doesn't work because it can't find the Renderman installation path. The add-on panel gives you about four different methods for finding the path, but none seem to work for me. It's a mess!

I manually created environmental variables. I added and removed the add-on several times with no success.


I gave up.

I started playing with Blender. Every render crashed. I removed renderman, I removed the manually added environmental variables. Nothing fixed the issue. 

I thought back. Hm, you know, I accidentally unticked the cycles add-on in a fat finger moment. I instantly re-ticked it but on checking back I saw that the add-on I see that Cycles was no longer assigned to a rendering method. So no longer set to Optix or CUDA. 

I reenabled Optix. Saved and restarted. All is well...for now.