PRETTY VIDEO.

I was going to post a video of a big machine working but that is on hold. I believe the driver wants to get his highlights done and his nails painted.
I am slowly getting the gear animation sorted, I think they look sparkling bright.

Have fun.
The gears above were horrible but I found a stack of spread sheet generators here.   Otvinta  Some they do are Python scripts. Non seem work in Blender 2.8 but one can create the mesh in 2.79 and import it into 2.8 for materials and render.
Here is my first effort. This wasn't generated from the script but modelled the old fashioned way. The tooth form formulae Otvinta provided.

This is quite a challenge for me but I'll try and get a simple gear train to animate and if I have the patience model something posh.

PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR.

I am still hooked on Blender 2.80. It's still in Beta so no installer yet. I am currently engaged in lots of other stuff.
 I look forward to Mondays as GOING POSTAL has a maths lesson. These are hard adding up and taking away, much harder than anything I have done.

Euler's Pentacostle or some such theorem proved but I suspect only in this iteration.
 Going Postal's previous article was about killing American Indians. Not very nice, they were annoying proper folk but I notice that we Europeans get blamed for everything by Black and Tan tinged folk. If our forefathers hadn't bought slaves from their peers they would be relying on Oxfam in Africa today. Daft buggers they are, both the Africans and Oxfam. The latter maybe not so daft as it provides them with remuneration for their sexually predatory habits. Africans  could do with some serious mathematics. Oxfam could do with serious genital mutilation.
I am playing with an automated automaton that will drag a title sequence into a video title on a bit of rope or chain. The rigid body physics I am finding very complex. Mine keeps going belly up. Not computer crashes, Adrian crashes. Dozens of them. I don't like modeling precise stuff in Blender but have tried modeling 3D gear trains in FreeCAD and importing them with little success. I use Obj. file extensions. I'll try some others and when I find one that works I'll keep it a secret. For five minutes. All the young folk, working on amazing stuff like the Steam Punk title sequence used in that lunchtime political programme know it already. Smart arses they are; bet a pound to a penny they have a degree in Welsh studies, Sheep shearing, English Literature or some such. Happen I should get one. 
This is how it starts. I coloured it in as I like colours and have just found out how to do it in Blender.

These are Blender gears. I don't think you could pop colour on different bits before without texturing. As you can see the bevels don't mesh the bevel angle is 45° and they are at 90° to each other. Bless my soul and I'll go to the bottom of my Nan's stairs. I have settled for Boolean joining up. The lower bluey green bit is three bits booleaned. I got rid of the shafts as they were causing problems. I'm sure I labeled them as passive but really can't recall as I got very muddled up.

I have some snaps in glorious HDR  for photographer of this year in Auchtermuchty, not in a National Park. Also a Kwizz.

 My dogs and Dozer the Labrador.

Snow drops with rain.

A bit more forest. I like this lens, it's manual focus and cost an MP's salary without the 200% they add on for living costs. Bastards!

The Kwizz. Anyone know what this is? It weighs over a tonne and I fetched it from Aberfeldy. It works on a big excavator. I'll get some video of it doing it's stuff.
Have fun.

SEA.

It has become almost clement, spring is on it's way but I shan't cast off my winter thermals just yet.

Snowdrops are blooming everywhere.

Before I forget if anyone is interested in a free Youtube downloader there's one HERE. Works like a dream.

I am still playing in the new Blender software and am delighted with the whole package. This video shows an animated sea, the clouds need replacing with proper animated or procedural clouds. The video does require some masking in the compositor to break or blur the horizon and the camera focus improving. I will try and get it to track a wave. This is a draft birthday video and I only have a couple of days to sort it.

Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

I WENT A WALK.

I go walks at least twice a day but today I decided to go birding. I took my best birding lens and stuffed a 50mm in my pocket. On arrival at Loch Leven I was immediately drawn to a couple of Mute Swans.....wait a second, there was a duck swimming even further out. On perusal, a blasted mallard, a male one should anyone be interested. I gazed upwards and saw to my surprise a dozen Herring Gulls. I park at Burleigh Castle not at Vane Farm which is the posh RSPB end of the Loch. There is a beach at Burleigh and the dogs like a paddle. Half a mile away there is a hide. I don't take dogs into hides as I get mutterings and the dogs eat the birders pieces. Then it becomes shouting, which annoys other birders.....A piece round here is the same as normal folks snap or wrap. Can be anything from a Sandwich to a pastie or bridie as these heathens call pasties; a picnic for really posh folk.
I left the dogs outside with strict instructions to sit and stay. I didn't stay more than five minutes as I couldn't even see the Swans. Out I wandered and not a dog to be found. They know where the car is so I decided to take a snap or two on my wander back. I took two.

I like this and fortuitously it came out a bit sepia. It's times like this that I wish I had my film camera with me. It looks great cropped.

And contrast boosted.
The second was rubbish.
 I strolled back to the beach and waited on a bench. My two Terrors poled up some ten minutes later accompanied by a pair of Spaniels. The Spaniels were followed by a breathless lady who said my dogs had led hers astray. I told her astray is what dogs do best. Best just to sit and wait for the little sods. She wasn't best pleased but one can't please everyone.
PS. I noticed that the winner and several runners up were all HDR images. I like them but as they are easy now I do wonder a little.
SEE

I WANTED SPARKLES.

Not the Hewitt boy's Sparkles but proper ones for the birthday video mark sevenish.
 This Blendering is becoming obsessive, not unhealthy so as I went for a haircut and still admired the hair cutter. Drop dead gorgeous she is and reasonable at six pounds a trim plus a tip for being quick with the scissors and comely.
I decided to do another birthday video. I wanted multicoloured sparkles. Not asking a lot but 2.8 has forsaken groups. And Layers. We now have to use collections. These Collections are better for instancing. (Your guess is as good as mine). They do work a bit like groups. Finding out what to click when and where is a real pain but endlessly entertaining.

I have had a couple of days fighting software. Adobe has a great selection tool in the eraser. It will separate a horses hair on it's mane or tail from the background, assuming the background has some contrast it doesn't need much but you do have to take passes with adjustments in between them. It  is no good shooting in JPEG through a phone or worse still a bridge camera. One needs massive files to produce a tidy result. The problem is setting it up to do it. Anyone with PS6 wants to know just ask; I'll do a tutorial on the hidden nightmare. I began to see the attraction of one click Apps with a slider or two.

The following video is my attempt at showing how to use collections to group multiple objects as particles in Blender 2.8. There are a few interesting and colourful bits for the majority who won't succumb to the free entertainment this software provides and I finish off with my latest project which is getting object transparency using the EEVEE render engine. A right pain in the bum it is too but I'm almost there.
 I have rehearsed this a dozen times over an hour or so but still cuckoo on the final screen grab. I'd be a terrible actor. I can't learn my wurds. My fingers press stupid. Special needs I am.

That's all for now.

SUCCESSFUL FUN.

Yesterday my brain turned to mush but when I woke this morning just a few clicks sorted the problem. No special needs for me. This is done start to finish in Blender 2.8. I'm not an artist so that side of things could do with improvement. The video rendered at between six and eight seconds a frame using EEVEE. I suspect that using cycles the time would be measured in minutes a frame. I'm a happy clicker.

That's all for now.

FUN.

Life can be a little depressing at times. I am struggling to master Blender 2.8 but I am making progress. It does crash now and again. Not that often unless I confuse it.
 It reminds me of the time years ago when I went to work in France, I spoke all day in French to the best of my ability. After work we used to go for a beer and after I had got used to their custom of two tiny glasses and not our custom of three or four pints, it was grand.....Almost....I can speak languages but can't write them. This is how the conversation went. After the first round.
Rigger. " questque tu prend?"
Me.       " Un autre si vous plait."
Rigger. "Que désire?"
Me.      "Uno cerveza por favour?"
Rigger. " AAH.... Le meme chose......Graci.
So language is learnt. Everything else for that matter.
A week later we entered the same cafe and It was my turn to get the first round. I asked what they would like, Keska eel prendez. They said, Cinq, something different to biers but it was Saturday lunch time so I thought it was a special drink they had taught me. I recited it twice and in I went. The lassy didn't bat an eye when I conveyed their wishes but when they followed me she flew from behind the bar and thrashed them with a wet towel. I did ask what they thought she was capable of giving me five of and more to the point could I survive it. They were all in convulsions so I never did find out. My French wasn't up to it. So language is learnt.
School should be for the three Rs. No good asking a teacher to teach this 3D malarkey. No good asking me but I have had a request or five and I don't bull shit. I can sort simple stuff for folk. Teachers seem to demean pupils to cover their own inadequacies. (that was a hard wurd; Thank the Google for spell chucker)
Blender 2.8 is a lot like this. I went back to 2.79 and was struggling. The new interface is so much more intuitive that I am in awe of the work and effort involved. It will take ages for the manual to catch up so I am doing what I always do; click on stuff, pray and try and remember what worked and what didn't.
This morning I downloaded a new Beta version and low and behold it gets better. Silly things like fonts are now easily legible in the font viewer, the bevel tool is silky smooth, the video editor accepts image sequences without any hassle. If you drag and drop HDRIs then it is a disaster zone that takes twenty minutes with Mapping to sort...Half sort.....I can get it something like. If you load them sensibly through the node they work fine.  It will get sorted. I am on my third iteration of 2.8 Beta and if you see anything below I've done summat.
I definitely did summat.

I got both screens full to overflowing with PNG images. Bastard! I saved them to a file on my desktop as is my wont but it ignored the file bit. Not only that it ignored my sparkles! See no sparkles. Bastard EEVEE and bastard Blender.

You aren't supposed to see the cone bit and the lighting needs a shove. EEVEE is good but it will Take me an hour or several to work out what to push where. I am pushing it as little as possible the particles are this shaped.

I use the funny thing on the right as a particle, it has two fewer vertices than a cube and two more faces to react with light. It's only four days to her birthday, Help.
That's all.