It's important to finish things.  If you abandon every project you start because it doesn't meet your idea of perfection you never learn the process of getting to the end. All projects go through an ugly stage, you just have to have the faith in yourself to push through, and that only comes from experience.

Fake News (Alien Edition) was inspired by the aliens in District 9 and some paintings by Chris Foss that featured Easter Island heads.  I was hoping for a more "realistic" style but what I've ended up with looks a bit like Antz.  Next project, one of the major goals will be to go for something more photo-realistic.  That's been something I've been working on all year.  Where to add detail, how to texture etc.  Seems like this is something you just have to learn by doing, no short cuts... 
I'm estimating that I have around 20..30 hours in this project, but it was spread over a couple of week.  That means as I get better something like this should only take 2 or 3 days. 

I've used Blender's sculpting tools a few times with limited success.  This time I decided to sit down and watch some training videos rather than just guessing how to do stuff.
Found this series of videos by Grant Abbitt and I think they are pretty good.  The use of constant detail, refining the shape and then cranking the detail up seems to be very logical and perhaps not what I was doing before.  Also |Grant does a good job of showing you the finished product at the start of the video and his videos are clean and concise.  Videos where you don't see the results until the end are a peeve of mine.

​Time to make an Easter Island Head.

I'm currently working on an Alien outside new broadcast... Inspired by District 9 and Chris Foss's Easter Island head spaceship paintings.  Here's an early shot processed to look like a Victorian photo.  One of the important things here is even though the ships and head will be small on screen in the final product, I need to make them appear to be the same scale.  If you imagine the ships to be about the size of a 737, then the head is huge, so I'll have to pay attention to that when adding the materials.   This head looks like its about 4 inches tall. 

This is a pretty exciting week for Blender users with 2.81 dropping.  As well as a host of new features it offers improved performance when rendering.  I decided to take a look, since performance influences which renderer to use.  In my case, I love the look of cycles but I'm just too impatient.
Using a scene from a project I just finished I decided to compare 2.8 with 2.81 as well as with the latest Studio Ready driver from NVIDIA.

Summary: 
For my limited test scene on my specific computer: 

• 2.81 halved my render time using Eevee.  >54% gain.
• 2.81 cycles with OptiX decreased my render time by a quarter. >25% gain.

Win!

Note: I didn't compare the output images except visually. They look about right, I don't know how different the pixels are, it isn't something I'm that concerned about.  If you need to match footage between versions that might be something you care about. 

Your mileage is going to vary! My scene probably has all kinds of weird stuff in it and for my cycles renders, there is still a lot of noise.  That's partly because I did the project using Eevee so I didn't care about the lighting for Cycles.  The Eevee and Cycles renders look totally different.
My system is an off the shelf HP Omen desktop running Win10 .

• i7 9700F
• 16GB
• RTX 2060

Eevee Performance
Switching from 2.8 to 2.81 gained me a significant performance increase. 
This increase did not change with the new OptiX driver. 

Blender Eevee Time to Render Per Frame for 24 Frames

• 2.8   = 2.6 Seconds
• 2.81 = 1.2 Seconds

Pretty nice lift right?  Basically my Eevee renders now take less than half the time.

Cycles Performance
Blender Cycles Time to Render a Single Frame

• 2.8 = 90 Seconds
• 2.81 =  262 Seconds  <-- this is bad and wrong and I'm a doofuss.

Wait? What? Dur.  Important point here.  You need to go into:
Edit->Preferences-> Cycles Render Devices
and set your preferred rendering system. If you have it set to none which is the default, its going to render on the CPU which will be slow.  

Cycles Performance Take 2
By the time I realized the mistake above I'd already installed the latest Studio Ready driver from NVIDIA using GeForce Experience.  I wasn't willing to roll back drivers to test this but I did do render tests on the latest driver with 2.81 with None, CUDA and Optix.

Blender Cycles Time to Render a Single Frame

• 2.8 (Cuda?) = 90 Seconds
• 2.81 (None) = 262 Seconds  <- This implies previous test on old driver wasn't using GPU.
• 2.81 (Cuda) = 89 Seconds
• 2.81 (Optix) =68 Seconds

The interesting result here is 2.81 using Optix. I'm seeing about a 25% reduction in render time which again is definitely worth having.

Disclaimer: 
I used to work at NVIDIA :-)

Finished this one off. Definitely learned a lot this time around. 

Seeing as I wasted an entire day on this....   
I was building a tiled road section with nornal maps, when I rotated tiles I started to see some weirdness in the specular.  Took me a while to figure out what the issue was.
The input to a normal map vector should have a Color space of Non Color.  That's probably true for all normals maps wired up this way :-0  Doh! Doh! Doh!

In the past a lot of my cg work has been 2.5D at best and I've added camera shake in post.  But since upgrading to the latest version of Vegas I've lost my favorite camera shake plug in.
Previously I would have been warey of adding camera shake in Blender since rendering a 5 second clip could easily take 5 hours but with eevvee (the very fast OpenGL Renderer in Blender 2.8) I can generate 1080p 24fps video frames of my current scene in almost real time. This means that taking risks in the animation is much less expensive compared to using Cycles (the ray tracer).
Here's a youtube from an annoyingly young person showing how to add noise to a camera in the graph editor.  Obviously this noise could be added to anything, not just cameras.  Also obviously this doesn't mean I won't continue to add camera shake in post, it's just another tool in the bag. 

Getting ready to call this done... this took about 3 weeks.  Blender and Substance Painter mainly.  This is supposed to be an off-world mining colony in the style of Bladrunner/Alien.   I need to add a bit more detail to the terrain, but that can wait until my new computer arrives. 

Nice video here on how to achieve this: 

I pretty much just use this blog to remind myself of stuff... so here are a few blender things I learned and then forgot and then learned again.... 
​

Pretty much every other graphics package on the planet lets you zoom and center on a selected object by pressing the 'F' key.  In Blender its '.' on the numeric pad.  I actually like how Blender uses the numpad but I usually forget this one.

Handy for things like windows in a spaceship, where you want a single mesh but with different materials.  It's not complex, but it's not obvious either. 
​Follow the link for satisfaction.   
​​https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/516/add-different-materials-to-different-parts-of-a-mesh

Basic fog, but also a great introduction to the Compositor.  A big slice of Blender awesome that I've barely touched.

I had been meaning to figure out how to do this for ages.  Another one of those things that wasn't immediately trivial but actually isn't difficult and can save a lot of time.  Click the world tab on the left side of the shader editor and then add the mapping node.  Stolen from here: ​https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/47833/how-do-i-rotate-an-environment-texture

First pass on some dumpsters and a radar tower for the Coffee project.  Not that happy with how this stuff looks.  Some feedback I got was the materials don't look realistic and are too similar.  I'm also concerned that the geometry doesn't really represent what I'm trying to convey.
Also... fewer stickers please!

So I went off and took some reference images this morning.  Hopefully by trying to get closer to these I can make more convincing looking output. Stat tuned for... better stuff hopefully :-0