100 Days of Dev: Series 4 / 2020 (Days 51-60) Blender Shaders, More Mars & PC Dead?

On By Alex_ADEdge

Another 10 days to review. 

Not the biggest stretch of 10 days, especially compared to the previous post. I mainly worked on Mars-related project work during this time, but also took the time to sharpen up some alternate skills and do a bit of reading/writing. 

The main work over this period summarized:

1) Blender Shader Materials 
An area Ive been wanting to learn more about is creating these node based Cycles/Eevee materials in Blender 2.8. Ive never really had the best grasp of Blenders material nodes and only last year got up to speed with the Cycles render engine. Ive certainly worked a lot with the compositor node setup, but this tutorial from CGMasters helped me learn a bunch about procedural materials in Blender 2.8. This material also sets the foundation for a reworked Starship heat-tile material I’d like to make, since the one I slapped together earlier in this challenge is super basic and not very pretty.

Its also really satisfying to turn what could easily be node-spaghetti into something organised, ordered and nice to look at (it almost looks like computer circuits or something). The ‘Reroute’ node is now my favourite node! D:

Carbon fiber material & node art

2) Another Starship experimental side project.
This idea/test came out of nowhere and is almost complete already, just a bit of fun that I should end up posting on Twitter in the coming weeks. Ive got a Starship model lying around, so why not find some other things to use it for!

Starship model in what program?? – Some other side project coming soon

3) MK1 Model
Towards the end of this 10 days I revisited my MK1 Starship model. I created this one in mid-late 2019 after finishing my Starhopper 3D model. With newer and much sleeker Starships being produced I really want to get this MK1 tribute done and printed in the coming weeks, so I made a list of things I needed to improve for the final print.. and got into it. 

MK1 Model, as of 2019. Not bad but we can do better!
Working on better panels for MK1, to get that real prototype-hunk-of-junk-rustic look

4) Reading & Writing
Not heaps to say here, but I did continue to read the Mars books Im getting into currently and have continued with a related writing project.

Efforts were hampered a few days into this 10 day stretch though… since first thing Saturday morning I sat down with the whole day free, ready to get some work done – and of course my computer wouldnt start.. at all. Completely dead. Thankfully I have my work laptop as backup and plenty of reading to do, but the PC issue took time to debug. Eventually it proved to be the PSU – which seems to have fried itself (probably too much rendering and photogrammetry processing over the past 4 years).

With a friends spare PSU borrowed I had the PC up and running again a couple of days later, just with half the electronics hanging out the side while I wait for my faulty PSU to be replaced (still under warranty which is a win at least) 

Its still good! Right..?

Thats it for days 51-60. Adding 6 hours and 30 minutes to the hour counter:
Total dev-hours recorded for the challenge overall:  123 hours & 30 minutes