Aerial Shot - A new direction

 The director provided feedback on my last concept. He's come up with a new sequence, as follows:

Shot 1: Planet (Low Orbit) showing the local region

Shot 2: Aerial shot showing the rugged location of the up-and-coming service road scenes with a mountain range backdrop and, further back, a coastline and an island that features a city from which plumes of smoke are visible.

This seems to flow better, but it's going to be a challenge to smoothly segue from a very high altitude to a lower one. Do I need to create a planetary texture that features the landforms that are visible in the follow-on shot? Yes, I think I do.

What first?

What does the planet look like?

Draw it!

Calantica is a young world with a single major continent and a tectonic system that runs straight along the equator. The main human settlement, New Caligari, is located just north of the equator, surrounded by numerous resource-gathering settlements.

The area of interest is located on the coast of a small northern sea with a more moderate climate.

I tried to sketch the regional area but found it very hard to project accurately. 

What next?

Build it!

1. Grab a big Earth texture map. I used a 16k map.

2. Clone the sea and make that the top layer. 

3. Import the sketched planet map, and use your image editor's tools to cut away the background. 

4. Create another layer and use it to trace the coastline in a black outline. This is where you can create the fine detail that will make the most of your 16k resolution. Once you have the coastline outline, fill it with black. It's a mask!

5. The sea around coastlines is lighter because continental shelves are shallow. One way to get that light-blue coastal sea is to create a copy of the landmass mask, paint it light blue, and apply a strong blur. Once you're happy, you can merge the deep-sea and coastal shallows layers.

6. Now use the landmass mask to cut a hole in the sea layer through which the familiar terrain of planet Earth will show through.

7. This part is fun/therapeutic. Use your image editor's powerful clone / infill brush  to paint into the big gaps using Earth's biomes. Careful brushing can create appropriate biomes such as mountain ranges, dry and temperate zones. Start by getting the land filled in without worrying too much about the details.

8. Once your land is filled in, start blending and cloning away the harsh borders.

9. You'll need a specularity map that will make the seas more reflective than the land. This is easy to create using a white layer and your land mask. There's an extra step, though! While creating the land textures, you should include big rivers and lakes, which also need to be selected, copied on top of the spec mask, and set as white patches, so they catch the light just like the oceans.

10. You might need a displacement map, although this can be fudged using Blender nodes. In True SKY 3, the Earth shader already does this.

Well, that's the easy part done. There will be fine-tuning required once you are happy with your staging, so you will understand which areas need the most attention to detail.

Blender School: Hard OPs and Boxcutter Restarted

 Let's finally complete the Hard OPs course and see if adopting these powerful hard-surface modelling workflows is worth the effort.

001 Boxcutter Configuration

Josh tells you how to open Boxcutter: "D" or, if it's not turned on, Alt+W, then "D".

Josh turned off the full menu because he favours the simple pie menu. As a rank beginner, I'll benefit from the full menu at this stage.

002 Box Helper Menu

Hard Ops has a help menu that provides an in-viewport pop-up that copies all the main interaction points. These mirror what's going on in your properties panel. Josh doesn't use them, but they are available if you like.

Help Panel: Ctrl+tilde

Workflow and Sharp Options are worth looking at.

Keep workflow NonDestructive, Leave the Sort Modifiers in place, these order modifiers appropriately as ordering of some modifiers is important -- such as weighted normals being the last in the stack.

Hard Ops Helper - Workflow 

Video 1 Cutters

Box Cutter is nothing if not good for cutting. 

The full-fat menu gives you a lot of information. Maybe Josh is right, and this is too much, but it's a good learning tool for beginners.

The top line shows the current set of default properties. Cut - Box - Object

Cut (X) is the default, but you could select:

• Slice (Slices mesh selection)
• Intersect (Intersect the mesh)
• Inset (Inset into the mesh during an intersect slice using a solidify modifier)
• Join (Union boolean to join meshes together)
• Knife (Cuts into  real meshes)
• Make (Create neutral forms without applying any booleans)
  
  

Cutter forms:

Circle, Box, Ngon, Custom (default is HardOPs logo)

Collection: Select a Blender collection. HardOPs creates a Cutters collection.

Solvers:

• Float (Fast but not super-accurate
• Exact (Slower than Float but handles co-planar faces)
• Fastest solver, but only works with manifold meshes

Modifiers:

Solidy (Add a solidify modifier) Makes your cutter solid.

Mirror (Mirrors your cutter. Select Axis X,Y,Z)
Array (Arrays your cutter. Axis, degree, Set float, instance count)

Bevel (Bevels your cutter. Width, Segments)

Example cut

I play with the tool and ....

 <Shouts> "Limitless POWER!!!"

It clicks, but in that way that a leaves you feeling a bit shaken and overwhelmed because there's too many moving parts for your brain to follow.

When Boxcutter is enabled, you only need to drag out the shape, then extrude (don't immediately click unless you want to extrude all the way through). Once you extrude to your preferred length, they click (once).

During the operation:

 Press "B" to enable bevel. You can cycle through B types and use the mouse wheel to change segmentation. One of the modes enables grab points (blue circles), which can be moved to change the shape of your cutter.

Press "W" to enable wedge mode. Press W again to flip and again to remove wedge mode.

Wedge turns the cutter into an angled edge.

Press "S" to scale the cutter and press "R" to rotate the cutter.

All together now: Scale, rotate and bevel

Josh says he doesn't use these adjustments; instead, he does everything manually — presumably postoperatively.

Post-operation adjustment

I usually don't get my cutter exactly where I wanted it. If you need to adjust the cutter, just enable its visibility in the Cutters collection.

Cutters Collection gets cluttered..

First play. I'm impressed!

Booleans

Back to the Boolean types.

The default is Cut, but you can press "X" during the operation to toggle between each boolean type. The cutter area will show a different colour for each boolean type.

Phew! There area some important points I'm sure I failed to capture, but that was a great first lesson.

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

Back to the terrains

 I've been doing lots of sculpting and testing. I travelled down a dead end as I started looking at shots that fall outside what the director needs.

Director says, "Only the skies!"

Whoosh...goes the deadline

 The Christmas hols are ending. I'm back to work tomorrow, with an early start. This was the logical deadline for finishing the Shamrayev. Alas, I do need to move on as I'm committed to returning to the Raptor project, which calls for the urgent creation of some aerial concept shots. 

The command module lost its colour banding because you just can't get away with painting colour strikes just by painting mesh faces. The subject calls for more complex shapes with bevelled corners. It looks much better without them. Maybe I'll create a texture map with more complex go-faster stripes?

The first attempt at the "flag" seems okay. Is it too big? Having a flag is an anachronism because identification would be through advanced full-spectrum sensors at thousands of kilometres. But it's a cool way to include the vessel's colours and name. It feels like a worthy dedication to today's Ukrainian fighters.

I'm going to create new spin habs with improved cloth cushioning.
And I'll add some more details to the engineering block.

I started to do some clean-up. The hanger door elements were consolidated and can now open. I plan to do work on the hangar's interior as well as model one or more sub-craft, possibly two "shuttles" which I envisage as "space cars".

Shamreyev Details

 Okay, playtime is over. It's time to start adding bolts and buttons. 

Shamreyev's Big:Medium:Small modelling approach has finally arrived at small. Did I already do some small things? Yes, I nearly always step outside the build order for the odd thing. In real life, there are small things because some things need to be small. In modelling, there are small things to break up areas and add interest. A super tanker is defined by its big ship shape, but it needs those tiny railings and surface equipment to sell its scale.

I've decided to go with the streamlined command module and play on the idea that it can operate as a separate vehicle. I'm not in love with the design, but if I can get the surface details right, it will work fine.

Rescale

I'd decided that some critical ship elements are too small, it would be too cramped in the hab modules, and there's not enough room in the hangar for anything bigger than a family car. So I need to rescale everything. It can be a pain to use the scale tool on object collections, as you will need to reset the scale, and Blender may send notifications/complaints about every individual object that is instanced or related at Blender's data level. 

I believe the best approach is:

1. Unhide everything so that you don't miss the rescale operation. In this case, I made sure that my scale reference figure is not included, given the point of the exercise is to make the ship a bit bigger relative to the figure.

2. Create an empty cube. Place it where you can select it. I placed it in the centre of the ship and scaled it up to encompass everything. Resetting the scale, of course.

3. Parent all the ship's objects to the cube.

4. Rescale the cube, using its object panel to ensure the rescale is precisely right.

5. Reset the scale. Everything should have a scale of 1:1:1

6. Delete the empty. All the elements were rescaled, and the scale was reset without complaint.

Rescaled to +40% New total length: 304m

Even rescaled, those spin habitats are really too small for comfort. You'd get away with fractional simulated gravity, but to make them generate 1g, they would spin like the wheels of a car, and you would get very uncomfortable.

Details start to arrive. Some windows! Wooo!

I'll return to the modelling tonight.

First Friday

 This morning I worked up another terrain. Not for therapy! I really wanted to test out 64km of terrain. That is huge, and as I discovered, it's too easy to view from too high. I had the camera essentially in low Earth orbit (that's only 1-2 terrain lengths), which reduced the terrain to a very faint, rather meh. However, there was something else going on. It might be a bug in World Creator triggered by the extreme terrain dimensions or the shape layers. 

I'll try again next week. A 64km terrain is maybe too big.

Meh!

Shamrayev  

I came back to the Shamrayev this afternoon and immediately got stuck. I don't have a fully worked-out idea for the command module. I wanted either to dress it up or completely rebuild it.                                                                              

More mission pods, but they make no sense. But I do like adding a blocky area.

This is a bit more like the original 90s design but I wasn't feeling it.

This has a nice space tech vibe. I suddenly imagine the command module detaching from the rest of the ship and becoming a lander. It's outside the bounds of this project, so I'm only hinting at landing struts. I suggest adding some external engines. 

It's time for the final modelling run. 

1. Fine details - ladders, airlocks, lamps, etc 
2. Clean up and fix any obvious issues.

3. Optimisation and finalisation (applying modifiers).
4. Redo UVs and create some textures.

Suddenly, "nearly done" doesn't feel quite so near the finish line.

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.