Phoenixart's blog

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Phoenixart's blog

Gaea explorations

The images below have been created with Quadspinner Gaea, community education.
The output map limit is 1k, and things are already looking good. I’ll go with the Indie version to see what a 4k map from Gaea can do.

Rendered in Cycles-X. The background sky has been created with the Physical Starlight and Atmosphere add-on.

One more

The first render is all done in Cycle-X.

In the second render, I combined two EXR passes: the one from the image above, and a few more passes rendered in Eevee (beauty, mist, bloom, emitter).
This combination works flawlessly. It’s nice to have the main beauty pass render from Cycle-X, and then volume emitter from Eevee.

New add-on by the Creative Bundle author

There’s a new add-on being developed, and the author has been kind enough to share the beta with me.
I did a couple of tests, and it’s quite fun to play with.

In this case, I’ve tweaked two basic cube shapes, and then I started random extruding, and random paneling the surfaces. Plus a few minor tweaks with the Creative Bundle.

Final result, The basic shape instanced

Main Setup, The basic shapes

Hard Surface doodles

I find doing some hard surface modeling somewhat relaxing. It’s an exercise of forms, and shapes.
I decided to test the Creative Bundle again. As for any hard surface add-on, there are specific workflow advantages tied to each of them.

Fluent is a very polished add-on, with a clear UI, and streamlined workflow. For some reason, I find it more suitable when I want to focus on the bigger parts. When it comes to tiny details, the Creative Bundle seems to fit better my needs.

The render times with the latest Cycle-X are about 10 seconds per frame on a dual 1080ti machine.

Testing Cycles-X

With the development of the new Cycles branch, namely Cycles-X, I wanted to give it a spin, and see how well it performs.

At a resolution of 1920 x 820 it took about 25 seconds per frame using 256 samples with adaptive sampling on.
I forgot to use the animated seed to improve the noise a bit, but in the end I’ve used OIDN denoiser in Fusion, so it wouldn’t probably make much difference.

It’s worth to mention that currently, Cycles-X can use 1gpu only.

3D assets provided by Poly Haven

Quadspinner Gaea, 1st test

This is the first output after experimenting with Quadspinner Gaea. The process seems pretty straightforward using the nodes provided by Gaea.
I’m trying other procedural terrain generators but at first glance, it seems Gaea is more fun to play with, the results have sort of a more organic feeling to them, and the interface is quite clean and easy to grasp.

The render below is a combination of a height-map and a flow-map imported into Blender — all from a 1k image map as I’m using the Community Edition.
Compositing done in Affinity Photo and Fusion.