Today was a productive day, first and foremost with translation for a client. You can visit the website here.

Second, I managed to get more modeling done for the test animations, pushing detail and style and also getting my workflow a bit better. I may need to delve back into Serpens to automate some of the work - but inverting the default UV seam colour is a big time saver in itself. Small adjustement, but worth a few steps per object. I also finished prepping the kitbash pieces for the mechs, good base meshes for one of the secondary hero characters. I have yet to put them into layout.

The other is... well I managed to finish using the metal colour palette for the workshop. It looks mighty fine even before the pre-processing! I am confronting a bit of a concern though, the brush strokes change over distance, but not the geometry detail. I wish Blender had automatic LOD system like it had in the game engine, or any other game engine. This could make the brush threshold for geometry to decimate well enough to hold the brush stroke without going super fine... I will have to experiment with that a bit. Maybe I need like a distance destroying system - or refine my racast boolean DOF for the paint layers so the pre-processor destroys detail the further away it gets. I will have to think about it. I am also finding a little performance issue, mainly due to the shader. I have dropped the material to 256 pixels, on render time I might have to switch out to 512 or higher, but to work I need low shadow samples and low viewport samples and also low texture res. The alpha clip on the fresnel gets heavy with the draw calls quickly. But I can still model in it.

I have also been using a little bit of geometry nodes to make the supports, but it's mostly just random position and rotation on instances. Everything else is still being hand placed and hand converted. I really need to learn Serpens more, to get more into the API to make addons to make my work easier - the material prep is such a time saver, but now I need a mesh prep system. I have to learn how to apply modifiers, transforms, freeze, then apply more modifiers, then freeze again, then run the vertex group baking. Maybe even have a colour prop to setup the base colour in a single click.

Free Resource of the Day

The free geometry nodes (3.0) asset today is the  Geometry Neon Signs scene group by Z-Weaver. It is incredibly fun to use! I think I will use and abuse this, atleast to generate my base meshes for the neon. I was wondering how much time I would burn making neon signs, but then someone released this for free on Blender Artists just today. So.. now to get some billboards and shop signs. They are also already animated! So I might need to adapt my material a little for the neon to link up with this.

‍

‍