OH DEAR. (03/01/16)

You are going to love this post. I suspect you will find it as interesting as macro shots of insects.

Whilst everyone around me was drinking the New Year in I settled down to some more Blendering. I made a wonderful sky which is a full 360° image it is very controllable it can be animated and made to go from dawn till dusk, the clouds get thicker towards the horizon and appear to dissolve and reform just like real ones I can have clouds any colour I like……. Brilliant it is. The controls are very sensitive so it is easy to lose the clouds as they are just noise with a mask on. I did try using volumetrics like thin smoke but I got in a muddle. In the second bit of this video I tried to make an animated haggis to run over the hill but it looked like a hairy rugby ball and not all it’s legs worked. I gave up. To be honest only one leg worked and then only it’s thigh and calf, it’s foot refused to function. I could have made it’s hairs longer to hide this discrepancy, I ought to have saved it for posterity.

I am really enjoying this 3D malarkey and will animate a camera to pan and zoom over the terrain now that I am getting slightly better at UV unwrapping the sculpted landscape. I did manage to get the camera to follow a Bezier curve but I didn’t manage to get it to point in the right direction. It pointed in any direction but where I wanted it to.

I found another exciting stunt. If you press CTRL+ALT+ the right arrow key your monitor display flips through 90°. I use CTRL+ALT+0 on the number pad to align my camera to view in Blender. I must have missed the zero key. That was twenty minutes of free entertainment getting everything the right way up and the right way round. I must try it again sometime as I’m not sure how I got things back on the straight and level. I did use some nasty words but as I haven’t got speech recognition on the computer couldn't hear me.

I notice that I got my flags looking better, I made the mesh they sit on much smaller but there is always a downside……..the clouds have gone away and I know not where.

I probably know half what I need to know to make a short film. The problem is that learning is an exponential process and I will just have to keep plugging away till it all sinks in.

This shows the state of my competence as of yesterday. I have another video rendering which I will post tomorrow. It is a vast improvement but still I am finding more questions than answers.

Have fun, I am as the rain pours down.