Forgotten add-on: Terrain Mixer

 

The results from Terrain Mixer are amazing. But without understanding much of how it works, its mostly an orange tinted tease.

I need to watch more tutorials. This is a re-run of Random Flow. It promised much, but I got nothing out of it. It wasn't intuitive. I almost gave up. Then it clicked, and suddently It's a creative tool, not a box of random.

Terrain Mixer uses a crazy set of node trees to mush up super high resolution noise maps. It's very clever, and I imagine that once you know what half of the wall of node modifiers do, it becomes more of a useful tool.

The detail...oh slighly overcooked here, but..oh the detail

Holiday rock material.

More Fluent 2.0 and Random Flow playtime

 

Random Flow 

The speed at which you can layer detail is amazing. I'm slowly understanding the effects of operations, so there's a bit more "design" going on, less random clicking.

Fluent 2.0

Fluent 2.0 is an amazing tool. I've overcome some of its kinks, like mirror tool widget only works if you work in a single panel. I tend to work with 3-4 panels, so the mirror tool just didn't work for me.

I make changes during a typical workflow that introduces horrible mesh corruption. Its not a bug, it's me not fully grasping how bevel geometry gets distorted when you apply changes on top.

It's all basic stuff, but yesterday I started to work see how you can use the powerful boolean workflow to cut out complex "engineered parts". 

Wake up and smell the Blender

 

It's been a busy week, so far. Our groundfloor extension work has started.

Coffee Mug

Extension render

More Random Flow Fun

 I really must close down Blender and actually read through the documentation. But its so much fun to fiddle. I took a nice pseudo-random metal material from the plugin's developer.  Nice one!

    

    

Pagapie 6.0

 

Oh my word. The new version of Bagapie (Blender 3.0, 3.1 only) has some seriously good improvements. So much to play with!

See https://abaga.gumroad.com/l/BbGVh

No more dis for Random Flow

 

So after getting to grips with Fluent 2.0, I'd committed to going back to Random Flow. I did, and something clicked. I now realise that its face selection is a bit eccentric and I'd completely misunderstood almost everything I knew, which was very little to begin with. 

One observation I'll make. The effect is best applied using thoughtfully placing mirroring. Random is good, but it usually takes some non-random aspect to make it look satisfying.

Doodles:

More fluent

 I've been pushing myself to learn the ins and outs of Fluent 2. I've been sitting on HardOps for years, a toolset that I know can produce amazing detailed hard surface models. This time I was going to put the effort into learn the toolset. Well, it seems to me that Fluent is a much simpler tool. It makes me want to get to grips with HardOps, but at the same time, its easy workflow makes me think, "why bother?".

I noticed that the array tool's count input wasn't working. Apparently a Blender 3.1 quirk, which the plugin's developer fixed and released (in the form of a daily build), within a couple of hours. Pretty amazing!

Just messing around with the tools:

Blending in the shadow of war

Russia invades Ukraine. The result is a geopoltical earthquake. Weeks on and there's no certainty that Russia will be successful, the people of Ukraine fight bravely --- and Russia's military machine looks incompetent, corrupt and quite frankly, suffering from  shock.

I've strugged to focus on anything, although I continue to play with Blender. If anything using Blender is a great comfort as 3D modelling is so absorbing that you easily forget about the world beyond the starting cube.

Random Flow 

Random Flow $15 (Blender Market)

Playing with the Random Flow plugin, which just got an update. It's extremely flexible and powerful, but I don't "'get it". Right now it just feels like making blind tuning, hoping for good results. Often not understanding why nothing seems to happen. Yeah, I need to read the documentation and maybe watch more tutorials. I'll get around to that and I'm sure that Random Flow will feel less random, soon.

Fluent 2.0

Fluent 2.0 - $29.0 with the extra Power Trip tools (Blender Market)

So I bought a new plugin. Fluent 2.0,  which also just got a big update. It appears to be an alternative to HardOps, which is the seminal hard surface modelling toolset -- to be fair, HardOps is its own modelling paradigm -- its not really some extra tools, its a completely different workflow. I think it is brilliant, but again, I feel very constrained and need to invest much more time to unlock its many benefits. In constrast, Fluent 2.0 seems like a simpler workflow -- again you work within its own workflow, but it's all driven by a simpler pie-menu.

For the first few hours I keep making errors or mishandling test models, so it's not a silver bullet. Again, I need to find more time for tutorals. However, something just clicked. I've a better understanding of the flow, I'm not tripping up as often.

Playing with Blender add-ons.

Physical Starlight and Atmosphere on top, World Creator 3 output on the bottom.

Additional mountain range mesh in the background. Can't believe I've never done it this way before, instead of trying to import a huge monolithic ground mesh.

 

Squished the mountain range to make it more plausible. Also made this a binary star system -- cool feature!

Added a human, generated in Human Generator 3. This is Hoff. Hoff is walking across this unforgiving alien world barefoot.

This evening I played with two brilliant Blender add-ons and a supporting realtime landscape creation app. This is rare for me. I prefer to be wrangling with vertices and modelling stuff, but its a nice reminder that not every part of your scene needs to be a creative labour. 

Physical Starlight and Atmosphere -
https://blendermarket.com/products/physical-starlight-and-atmosphere

Human Generator V3 -
https://blendermarket.com/products/humgen3d

Worldcreator 3 (beta) -
https://world-creator.com/

Volumes

 

I just realised that I'd not used volumes in a render in many years. I wondered if Blender's implementation had improved. I did some quick tests.

World Creator 2021 output with volume lights

Principled Volume with a colour ramped noise applied to volume emission strength

Old-style volume node

Underlit

Backlit

Def Stah

What's been going on?

 
So I just realised that I've not posted in ten days. It's not because my Blender activity has slowed down -- although I've not made my progress with the Fire Shark -- still working on it though.

Busy at work, I've done more tinkering and learning and fewer things to show off. 

That said, I built a rough concept model of Gateway, the space station that features in the roleplaying game 2300AD. It sits part way along Earth's beanstalk, a giant cable that runs from Libreville in Gabon to a geostationary captured asteroid. This cable allows people to catch "cable cars" into space -- though the trip takes days because you no longer need to generate massive thrust to get yourself up to escape velocity, you slowly get it by climbing the space elevator.

Gateway

USS Jefferson - placed in the scene to give a scale reference.

This is the Kennedy-class Missile Cruiser that I built a year ago.
See here.

A third spin habitat is going inbetween the two existing ones. I need to add more framework for it.

It's the wrong orbital location, but it gives you the idea.

Other bits and pieces from the last week:

More procedural space rocks

I had a play with Human Generator -- something is going a bit wrong. Not sure if its me or a bug. Assigning a pose appears to be placing a duplicate figure creating super-imposition lady.

The latest version of Human Generator has some lovely incremental improvements. At some point I'm going to create a space suit for these people.

Jemima