GRANDMA SAID. (14/12/14)

I do live in a contrary climate. Yesterday the skies cleared a bit so I went out for some background video for the Christmas greeting whatsit. No sooner had I got set up than it started blowing like crazy and before I got back to the van it was teeming with rain. It managed to keep it up until mid morning today when the winds eased. It’s now just past noon and the temperature is falling fast from a dizzy 7^oC, which was the highest I noticed overnight, to a promised –2^oC, the rain is turning back to snow.

I have decided to stop up here until next Saturday. Tomorrow I’ll take a trip down Glencoe to Ballachulish as there is a new CO-OP there and I’ll be able to get some food, fags and maybe a bottle of campanology.

What a difference a day makes the view from the van at lunch time.

   This waterfall is usually just a trickle. It is impressive today; I’m not surprised, the rain gauge says 6¹/₂”. We didn’t have that much by any means; my rain gauge is like a little seesaw and it goes berserk when the camper rocks in the wind, 69mph was the highest gust last night.

I haven’t had much sleep but did get a lot of 3D modelling practise. I am slowly getting to grips with the job. 

    I managed to model an acceptable 3D star on a stick. It doesn’t look 3D as I would have to animate it to show you all around but it looks and is fine. Lighting and surface materials are just to show it off. I won’t light it till I composite the final video. I am thinking of adding tiny spheres to the mesh in between each pointy bit and persuading them to emit a stream of tiny particles. That would liven it up a bit. This will be the centre of my revolving lettering. I may give it a new sort of stick, this one looks a bit boring. It is boring it’s just a stick but before you mock I’ll have you know that making a stick with a tapered end and slotting it up a stars bum is not as easy as it looks. I now know why folk work in Ortho Perspective. If one doesn’t then selecting vertices in front view only selects half of them. Half a stick scaled or extended is impressive but of use to neither man nor beast. I may have missed a trick here.

    I have sorted the swirls this one is a flattened 3D tube and also 3D when looked at in plan view. When I pan round it, it is a spiral. The big white bit is a soft light I used to show it to you. I ought to have switched it’s visibility off before I rendered but forgot. My Grandma used to say fifty years ago.

“ Adrian you are too clever by half ”.

I think she was too kind to say, half clever, cunning, devious or lacking in attention to detail. I’m almost half a century too late to ask her for clarification.

I am really enjoying Blender. I get so far several times and it all goes belly up. It does have history like Photoshop but as I’m too impatient to name stuff history doesn’t help.

I now have eight different animated spirals saved, they will have to be done again as I forgot to smooth them and rendered at ten cycles and not 500, they are a bit choppy, I’ll re-do them. I have a font worked out for the revolving text, I settled on Hobo. Some fonts do funny things when extruded and bevelled. I looked up the problem and it’s something to do with false normals, I have no idea what they are so went through lots of fonts until I found one that didn’t throw unexpected vertices about. The text spins in the right direction at a uniform speed and I have a star to twinkle. I was hoping to composite in Fusion but I only have a week left to learn Node compositing. I am not clever enough to master it in a year so will stuff all the stuff on my desktop and then pop it into Photoshop a video layer at a time. I can piss about with it in Photoshop. I am used to it’s quirks.

  I’ve had Blender for two years and am only now feeling slightly less apprehensive when playing in it. I’m sure AutoDesk is better but Blender is free and, despite it’s idiosyncrasies, is immense fun.

Have a wonderful week.