GORGEOUS. (23/12/14)

I woke this morning at three thirty, the rain was lashing down but even before daylight a friend was banging on the van. “Walkies time get up and out; Oh herbal tea man.”

We did a quick hour lap of the lake shore, the new cemetery and the woods. Not a drop of rain assaulted my person. The dogs had fun but couldn’t find Deer to annoy so after breakfast I went out birding. We sat for an hour or two; well I did the dogs buggered off with a couple of bearded collies for half an hour. Came back blathered they did and have both been under the tap for their trouble. Black they were.

    Foyers is a swamp. But it is 3^oC so middling warm.

   See it is sunny. It doesn’t get better.

Now for my birding……I realized years ago that I am not a very good birder. I don’t do it often.

     This is a Dunnock. I think it is a Hedge Sparra. That’s what I was told they were. It could well be something else.

      This is a normal Tree Sparrow. Totally different.

       This is a Blue Tit much brighter.

           Mr Chaffinch. It wasn’t a bad morning to early afternoon. I saw a flock of Goldfinch and some Longtailed Tits.

        No Partridge no Pear trees but a couple of Tufted Duck. Mr and Mrs almost in the same shot.

Last night I spent hours learning what others know instinctively. I have to turn this logo into a 3D graphic before the year ends.

      I snapped it. I deleted the rubbish , I polished it up by converting to B&W in Photoshop. I inverted as white backgrounds are good for vectors.I can colour it in again if I ever get as far as extruding all it’s bits.

         I then sharpened to within an inch of it’s life and bunged it in Inkscape. Inkscape is a free Adobe Illustrator. It’s a vector programme. I then went to Paths> convert to a BIT MAP thingy. Fine so far. I saved it to my desktop as an SVG extension. I went back to blender and File>User Preferences and hunted and seeked everywhere for SVG. It was looking me in the face. I’m not used to a lack of Bells, I am on Ginger, lemon, nettle, whenlock, harlot and Manlku tea or some such hippy rubbish. Eventually I  found it. Loaded it and it wasn’t there. It was but I only found out because I accidentally twiddled the scroll wheel and zoomed. It was really tiny. I then got a file in Blender which had a million vertices. I got rid of loads of them by asking Blender to rid them. This morning I have found ALT C which converts curves to meshes. It’s only a month ago I wanted to do the opposite but I had forgotten. If I live long enough I’ll sort both birding and digital imaging. Maybe not the birding.

Have fun I hope you are ready. I’m not but Christmas will pass me by while I’m Blundering and birding.

PS. I didn’t know that you had to be in cycles render to use your GPU. It is pretty obvious but I am a Muppet. I have spent a week thinking my computer was getting buggered. I even priced up a new GPU when for some brain lag or Muppetry I hadn’t activated the one I had…….Silly me or silly Blender.