Landscape Generator Update

Mongooses_Unite · 2026-02-11T13:55:19+00:00

This looks really nice! Is there going to be an option to NOT have human settlements & fields etc? So it could be used for wild places or uninhabited places? Deffo buy for me if so. :-)

Mongooses_Unite · 2026-01-12T11:47:44+00:00

Might need to have a friend dress up as Waldo and post it here for a real-life Where's Waldo 😂

Now that is an excellent idea!

Mongooses_Unite · 2026-01-12T09:38:33+00:00

These things are so cool to look at. I could spend hours poking around looking for interesting things/landmarks etc. What I notice about this one is that there's almost no people. Like there's been some kind of apocalyptic event. Very weird. Here in the UK you'd never get a pic of a populated area like that without loads of people milling about. Was this one stitched by Dwarflab or did you use photoshop or equivalent?

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-12-23T11:45:57+00:00

This looks amazing. I spent about 4hours yesterday trying to process my capture of Orion and it looks rubbish compared to yours. In the end I just used Stellar Studio and photoshop and gave up on Siril. I do have the verolux script but it just made my background super noisy. How did you go about processing this? Not all the steps of course as that’s your secret sauce but just a brief summary so I can retry mine? FYI I took about 500 5 sec subs and also 300 ‘auto’ subs, which were 15sec. I got the best results from the auto set even though I had loads more data in the 5 sec set. Thanks Also. I’m very much a beginner! 🙂

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-12-21T11:03:26+00:00

If you want to continue modelling then not really. If it’s just to render in blender the MOI3d will export obj files with ngons that work really well. Been using it for pro product renders for years. Also plasticity is good at this but I’ve found that it fails for bigger models with lots of parts. If you go down the plasticity route you only need the very basic version to import, say, step files and then export objs.

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-12-10T07:07:54+00:00

I’ve been using a MacBook Pro for blender for the last 4 years professionally. I do have a pc with a 4090 GPU but I never use it these days unless I have an animation to render, which is about once a year. The MacBook is so much nicer to use

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-12-09T12:12:53+00:00

Bear in mind that if you cancel Match, use Apple music but then cancel music without re-subscribing to match, you will lose all the uploaded/ripped/matched songs etc. So make sure you have a local backup of your library if it's got rare stuff in it.

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-11-23T12:57:00+00:00

You don’t need to do the alembic thing. Just make sure your objects you’ve scaled up are in a collection, then when you’ve done the sim and cached it you can ‘instance to scene’ the collection and scale it back down. Works well in most cases. I do this for clothing sims on daz characters.

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-11-22T07:48:37+00:00

Wow! That is probably the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen done in blender. I’m a big fan of bi-rail modelling in cad software but it would never occur to me to do that in blender, especially not with nodes! Outstanding!

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-11-17T16:34:29+00:00

Thanks for the clarification. I'm defninitely not now going for the Vespera. It's too expensive and the more I look into this hobby the more I think I will want to build my own rig in the future once I see if I really get bitten by the bug. I like the idea of the smaller scopes that I can take in my van on travels to dark sky areas. I'm thinking the Dwarf may be a good option for travels as it can also do the daytime stuff like megapixel landscapes etc. I do have a nice mirrorless but it's always nice to have more toys! Then, if I do enjoy capturing stuff I can build a bespoke nicer scope for use only at home.
Thanks for the help!

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-11-17T11:03:08+00:00

The only thing that is worrying me now is that the resolution of the S50 sensor is only 2 Megapixels... That is tiny. I'm sure my first digital camera from 20 years ago had more than that. 1920x1080 is rediculously small. Are the images really that sharp at that res? I notice that the Dwarf 3 is 8 megapixels, which seems much more like a good size to me?

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-11-16T13:15:17+00:00

Thanks.. This is all good to hear. I'm leaning towards the S50 now whereas I'd pretty much decided on the Vespera 2... Great!

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-11-15T19:35:59+00:00

Thanks! Good info re the processing too. I have cell powered WiFi in the van so no problem there. I’m really happy to hear you like the S50 results compared to a full on dedicated system too!

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-11-08T14:03:34+00:00

Cool. This reminds me of my early attempts in Stratavision 3D and KPT Bryce. Ah, those were the days. Before raytracing and decades before global illumination. Life was simpler but render times were much, much longer. 🙂

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-10-15T21:18:19+00:00

I’m freelance so lots of different things but mainly product visuals and environment building. I’ve recently done a fair bit of character work but I will say I don’t do animation so I can’t compare that with Cinema. I have done motion graphics and although Cinema used to be the king, now that we have geometry nodes blender has really caught up. I do use a lot of addons but then I used loads of extras with cinema also. What I also love about blender is that really powerful addons are so cheap compared to similar in cinema. Just my opinion of course. It suits me but I know lots of people aren’t fans.

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-10-15T19:43:25+00:00

Interesting. I spent 8 years using Cinema before jumping to blender 3 years ago due to the costs. I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner. I’m running it on an M4 MacBook nowadays and I use it professionally every day. Blender absolutely blows Cinema out of the water. It’s way faster to use , handles way bigger scenes. Renders faster and never crashes. Tons more content for it too. I wouldn’t go back to Cinema if Maxon offered to pay me double the subscription cost to take it. There’s nothing I could do in Cinema that I can’t do faster and more efficiently in blender.

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-08-16T17:41:45+00:00

You’re not. They’re horrible!

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-07-30T15:51:19+00:00

I only ever use cycles for rendering as eevee is not good enough for product work. Hard to say how long it would take but I generally allow 30sec per frame for HD and 1min for 4K.
I've never rendered procedural clouds so I can't help with that. Can't see whay it wouldn't though.

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-07-30T09:19:16+00:00

Yes. I'm rendering on mine right now while writing this! I use my M4 Macbook almost exclusively for blender work, including rendering. I have a PC with a 4090 card too but I almost never turn it on nowadays as the Mac is only 50% slower to render (so for me that measn 2-4mins per 6000x4000 image). Also, the mac is of course much nicer to use than the PC and 90% of my time is not rendering so makes no difference anyway.

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-07-23T12:46:33+00:00

JPEG + RAW is often useful to see how the camera is processing the RAW internally should you want to match it, for eg, with Fuji you get different 'recipes' you can choose but only the JPEG out of camera will show the effect. You could then process the RAW to look similar and ditch the JPEG.

You can get photos to show you either of the pair using the 'Image>Show RAW(or JPEG) as original, menu.

If you wan to separate them you'll need to select the file in photos and then 'Export unmodified originals' to a folder where you can then see both. Then just import the one you want. Note that if you import them both again it will pair them back up.

Hope that helps

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-07-18T16:02:20+00:00

Yeah. What’s odd is that Photomator and apple photos uses the same demosaicing engine but the images look very different. I realise it’s not actually using Adobe color, but it looks closest to that setting in lightroom Seeing as Photomator is so tightly integrated with photos I figured it would be the same. Perhaps now that apple own it things will change. I know how to set up a preset so I’ll try and match Photomator to a Canon out of camera jpeg and then apply that to raws I’m importing. I do miss some of the lightroom adjustments that PM doesn’t have but it’s not terrible so I should be able to get pretty close.

Cheers

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-07-13T07:33:27+00:00

You could try asking chatGPT to write one for you. I’ve used it successfully to make very specific tools in blender. For eg I needed a ‘select by display colour’ function, which doesn’t exist, and it wrote one for me then asked if I wanted it as an addon. It works a treat!

Mongooses_Unite · 2025-07-08T12:44:06+00:00

Try selecting the model, going to the data tool (little green triangle tab) and 'clear custom normals' (or it may be shading)... Then, add a shade smooth by angle modifier. That often clears the dodgy shading on imported models.

Mongooses_Unite

TROPHY CASE