Primitive village

Do you remember how I said I'd try to make another scene along the homework submission? I lied. Well, no, that's an ugly word. Let's say instead I temporarily forgot how insane I tend to go with these simple scenes. There, much better. 

I think I'll have a lot to say about Blender 2.8 so be prepared for the post to get unnecessarily long. Or, you can have a look at the tl;dr version:

It's true I wanted to broaden my horizons (I made a primitive room last time, if you remember) but maybe I should have limited myself to a house. Or a street. Not the whole village, for crying out loud. As it is, I ended up needing 938 objects in 96 unique meshes with 76 materials applied to them. And since 2.8 also offers Collections, I created a few those. 51 to be exact. (If you are a number person—you are welcome.)

But with that much going on, I don't really know where to start. So how about... rocks. Do you like rocks? I don't. They crash Blender. Or one of them does, anyway. Maybe I should mention at this point that I work as a software tester. Over the years I've built myself a fearsome reputation for breaking anything I touch. Pair this with the alpha version of Blender and you get hilarious results. In the case of the aforementioned rock I somehow ended up with an object that is pretending to be a part of the rock collection (it hasn't come anywhere near it) and whenever I try to delete it, it crashes the program. So I did the only reasonable thing I could do in that scenario. I renamed it to "Rock that crashes Blender" and I hid it beneath the plane. (Update: The rock is gone. I think I got rid of it at some point when I was cleaning up the file and renaming things. He won't be missed.)

On the subject of renaming things, though. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to keeping things nice and orderly but if anything has a chance of curing me it's those 938 objects. And meshes. And materials. Most of those renamed several times, because I'm a crazy person.

Featuring: Sheep

But let's not talk about that. I should instead focus on explaining how I overcame some of the issues that I stumbled into. For the first one we'll have to go back to the rocks. Initially, I thought I would place them with help of a particle system. But how do you set one up when you can only use the Object mode (goodbye vertex groups and weight painting). Well, I made it work with several emitting planes and a temporary SubSurf, only to find out I couldn't convert the particles to the actual rocks. So I deleted all of that and placed the rocks manually. And indeed learned my lesson.

To make things even easier to work with, there is a button next to every object that disables its selection in the viewport. In theory. In practice its only use right now is to sit there and look pretty. I don't know how many hours exactly I spent on the scene but I'm pretty sure half of that went into selecting something I definitely didn't want to select. 

Hello, Mr. fisherman

So, what's next? [looking at the long list of issues] Oh yes, the local view is not there yet. At least I hope that's a "yet", I can't imagine working without it. Not being able to isolate the object you are working on could be bypassed by using a separate render layer, but of course, those are gone too. They are replaced with collections and you can turn their visibility on and off as you like. That's good. What's not so good is when you want to make an instance of a collection. Let's say you make a windmill blade as a template and you want to add four instances to your scene.

Problem 1: If you disable the template's visibility (in viewport and/or render) it makes its instances invisible too. Solution? Move the template somewhere out of the camera view.

Problem 2, introduced by previous solution: If the template collection is not in the centre of the viewport, its instances will spawn with an offset. So if you have the template 2 units away from the centre on the x-axis and you want to place the instance three units from the centre, it will actually appear 5 units away. And if you think applying location will save you, then think again. What it does now is to move the object to the centre for you. Long story short, you have to keep the template in the centre. And you can't hide it. Great. 

What I ended up doing was scaling the template object down so that it disappeared below the grassy plane. Then I added the four instances, parented them to an empty and scaled that up to compensate. After that I parented the blades' empty to the windmill empty so that the blade size remained proportionally the same when I needed to scale the whole thing. I know it sounds complicated but it wasn't all that bad in the end, once I figured it out.

This experience made me introduce many more empties, which eventually ended up in their own collection called "Controllers". They made selecting the whole objects much easier but their usefulness found its limits once I added trees. Finding the right empty became too difficult so I switched to a faster way. I selected any part of the tree, pressed Shift+G => "Parent" and voilà, the empty got selected.

Looking back at the text I poured out in a short amount of time, I think I've covered the most pressing issues I had in mind and I can close this post in peace. But before you go, may I interest you in a few in progress images?

I believe next week the homework revolves around mesh modelling, and as usual I have no idea what I'm going to make. If you are reading this and you have a suggestion for something insanely difficult and overly ambitious for me to make, feel free to leave a comment. See you next time!