3D Progress!

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    Since the last update, I've continued to work on the design for Orion Skies, especially for the start of the game. I've been keeping my plans flexible enough that everything would work on the Nova engine, but also can be enhanced by the new features that are anticipated on the Cosmic Frontier engine. There are a number of things that are starting to come together in an exciting way, especially around exploration and nebula weather.

    However, my focus this month has been on continuing to learn Blender. Orion Skies will involve a lot of new graphics, so my priority right now is getting myself ready to create those graphics when the time comes. I've made some great progress, and am nearing the point of having end-to-end capability for creating decent graphics for vehicles, such as spacecraft. :)


Anvil Tutorial

    In the last update, I was partway through "Blender Guru"'s anvil tutorial, which I have since finished. The key focus of that tutorial was on texturing, which is how you can take a 3D shape and make it look like it's made out of a real material.


The completed anvil.

    Now that the anvil tutorial is finished, I've switched back to working on my independent practice project: creating environmental scenes featuring a 1950s naval jet fighter...


Texturing Practice: FJ-2 Fury

   To supplement the 3D tutorials, I've been practicing on my own. Orion Skies will involve a lot of spacecraft, so I knew I wanted to practice creating some kind of similar vehicle. I ended up choosing a naval jet fighter, the FJ-2 Fury. It's one of the world's earliest jet fighters, from the legendary F-86 family.

   I had previously created a 3D model of the Fury, but now I'm trying give it a photorealistic appearance of being built out of aircraft aluminum. After first creating a basic, "clean" metal texture, I've been working on adding details -- natural imperfections and variations, breaking the surface up into panels, and creating the appearance of weathering. So far I've made a lot of progress, and learned a lot of new 3D techniques.

The Fury's aluminum texturing, in progress.


Procedural Techniques

    When I create planetary graphics for Orion Skies, I am hoping to heavily leverage "procedural" techniques, wherein I can set basic parameters for a given planet type, and then have Blender automatically generate multiple landscape images based on those parameters. This should make it much easier to create a greater variety of unique planetary graphics.

    I had previously experimented with randomized clouds. Since then, I've set up nighttime scenes with the Moon visible in the sky, with randomized moon phases, as well as randomized star orientations.

The Moon's phase in this image, as well as the stars' alignment, were randomly generated.

    I've also noticed, based on reference photos, that the FJ-2 Fury can look very different depending on how much its metal has been weathered – so I've started working on creating a "procedural weathering" setup for the Fury's aluminum texture. That's still a work in progress, but it's already been a great learning activity. I'll post about that in next month's update.


Overall 3D Progress

    As I learn Blender, I'm continuing to loosely follow a curriculum outlined by "Blender Guru", a 3D artist who has created a number of high-quality tutorials. Here's where I'm at along this path:

    🟢 Donut Tutorial / Intro to Blender
    🟢 Chair Tutorial / Modeling
    🟢 Lighting
    🟢 Principled Shader / Materials
    🟡 Anvil Tutorial / Texturing
    ⚪ Composition
    ⚪ Independent Project w/ Photorealism
    ⚪ Importing Characters
    ⚪ Environment Creation
    ⚪ Aesthetics
    ⚪ Independent Landscape Project

 

Practice Image Gallery

    Here are some practice renders I've created since the last update. In these, I was learning how to make a more realistic night sky, and also working on the Fury's texturing:








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