IN THE DARK. (13/12/14)

What a day, more snow and hordes of people and a boring post to boot.

I was out before first light and the sky was clear which with half a gibbous moon and with my head torch perched over two layers on my head provided enough light for me to wander in confidence. I stepped out of the van and returned to fit crampons. It was very slippery under foot. I don’t know why but I also packed a survival bag a couple of dodgy Mars Bars ( they must be three years old) and a flask of green tea. All overkill for a half mile wander up hill. I only have a couple of pictures as the camera battery died  stuffed it in my shirt pocket to warm up and it started snowing again. I went to walk the dogs and was hoping for some pictures of a frozen waterfall. Ho Hum.

I noticed crampon prints in the snow and wondered who was up and away before me. He was a couple of hours before me.

        Busy moving snow from here to there with his backhoe. It looked skiable from where I was but modern skiers are not used to hitting powder and dodging rocks. Modern recreational skis are wider and much shorter than the ones I prefer; they don’t give the stability on variable terrain. They do make numpties look good though. I ought to try a pair.

           I took this just as I was returning to the van it is the snowplough stuck. The ISO was at maximum as they are hand held.  The car behind contains the breakfast lady so I settled for another bowl of porridge but as a treat dropped some raisins in and a spoonful of Manuka honey for my cold.

I have spent most of today playing in Blender 3D. I made a little Christmas star and what a job. It all went belly up but I have learnt how to import reference images and copy the vertices I want from the image to a plane and fill the faces extrude the centre vertices, then mirror modify and stick them together for a simple five point 3D star. Depending how time goes I may fiddle with the regular star and make it ten point with emitters on every alternate point. Really posh that would be. Sparkling bright. The card will be finished for the winter solstice. It won’t be as good as I want but it will be a very short video e-card or if I can compress it enough a simple GIF.

It is mind boggling how complex the software is and beyond me how anyone could write it or use all it’s features with enough confidence to create anything artistic or useful. Some folk even write bits of script to make it do things faster or better. I admire them, they must have three brains.

I can now make my Merry Christmas text follow a Bezier circle and rotate around it at constant speed. Default rotation follows a quarter of a sine curve so when I eventually sussed how to drop a couple of keyframes in to make it spin. It is obvious when one knows if you do a normal start keyframe then rotate the text or whathaveyou back to the start and add another keyframe 60 frames or whatever on, the computer thinks it hasn’t moved so it tells it not to. The trick is to move it a tiny bit. Key frame. Move it right round to start, keyframe again and it spins round the circle. It then kept going fast and slow. I found a thing called Dope Sheet which can be adjusted to linear which gives a straight line graph so constant speed; supersonic constant speed. It took me an hour to work out how to make the graph slope more gently. Better than the cryptic crossword for entertainment and frustration is Blender.

By lunch time today I was getting overwhelmed but had a couple of hours off and came back to it and sorted half of the problems. No doubt the other half will be harder. This is like posh Scrap Booking but isn’t a one click job.

Monday is looking good for some video and landscapes. The forecast is for heavy showers with sunny periods . Sunday is rain turning to snow.

Have fun. I’m still wandering in the dark. Just that sort of day.