2023-05-28 Life, and Trees
Still with the COVID. I guess this is what they call “Long COVID”. It’s nothing overtly major, just the dry cough will not go away, I forget to eat because I don’t have much appetite, I keep being so tired that I have to nap several times a day, and my concentration is even worse now than the depression already made it. So, yeah, nothing “major”, but silently keeping me down. I try not to let it get to me; there doesn’t seem to be any treatment yet.
My partner was gone for 2 weeks, and I always welcome that because I can do things around the house that are noisy and would be distracting at other times (and loud music without headphones is SO GOOD). Of course “can” doesn’t translate to “will”, but I did get some stuff done that had been waiting for a long while. And trimmed grass, hedge, grapevine, and rampant blackberry canes in the front yard – the back will just be wilderness.again, I fear. Well, the local wildlife will appreciate that.
Not much Blender then. I passed my 1 year anniversary and did nothing for it. It didn’t feel like a year – while I did quite well most of 2022, this year not so much. So I think I’ll do the near-obligatory “My First Year of Blender” retrospective when I finish the 2022 Sketchbook.
What Blender I did was mostly trees – I wanted a small lemon tree for the dining room scene. So I embarked on a survey of free add-ons. I experimented with the built-in Sapling add-on, which is super-complicated, though I did have some general success roughly following a tutorial by PolyRem:
You can see that you can achieve a rather wide variety of anything from potted herbs to groundcover to shrubbery to giant trees (not shown). The trick lies in knowing the parameters so well that you can command the shape, and I did not achieve that.
I tried to work with the node-based MTree add-on, but even with the version of Blender BlenderSecrets says will work, I had no success; that just kept crashing on me. I might have to buy a new hard drive, this one keeps throwing more and more frequent errors – that doesn’t explain why the add-on doesn’t work in newer versions of Blender, but why 2.83.20 crashes on me.
Then there is TreeGen, which felt more approachable than Sapling, and has several useful tree type presets, but one can’t make live changes (have to regenerate each time), and texturing it is massively annoying at first glance, because it doesn’t instance.
The textured tree is the only one I worked on, the others are pure presets.
Learned to draw a tree skeleton in GreasePencil:
@Renzatic & Co’s amazing GeoTree is too demanding for my brain which immediately fogged over. So in the end I made the tree I needed with verts by hand, with the Skin Modifier, weight painting, and particle systems. Made my own leaves and lemon and planter. I used BlenderSecrets’ videos, part1, part2, and part3 to remind me how to do things – nobody better for that than Jan; the videos are so short and concise.
Music: Concrete Blonde mix