HEADLESS CHICKENS.

Happy Birthday to Carole.

Now this is a very simple utilisation of animation nodes. The Happy Birthday bit is just normal animation. I do wonder if my mind is incapable of much more than this. I can sort of work multi track video but lack the dedication to make it perfect.
This is what the computer shows.

This is easy and if anyone is interested CHRIS PENNINGER can sort you out. If you get stuck with him then ask. He sorts me out.
I have dropped my following Blogger to about zero. I like the few lefty hypocrites like BeefPudding. The bloke is a source of endless entertainment. Thick as a pudding mind you. I enjoy MidmarshJohn for his programming expertise but he does tend to forsake this for plants. Boring things are someone else's plants. 
I guess this will be the last post here.
I Like YouTube, I get response and I learn a lot from it. Such is life.

IN A MUDDLE.

I have had an appalling week with Blender and Houdini. I have persevered and gone backwards. I got the sphere with coloured balls to perform but it kept crashing. Okay the machine was working hard and I expected to have to wait and wait I did. I recalled the days when HDR images took a kettle boiling time to chunder out stuff so put the kettle on. Came back and the result was hopeless. I couldn't edit anything. Bastard! I was an idiot and hadn't, until an hour ago, instructed Blender to utilise 90% of the machines RAM. Blender was making my machine look a fool.

Even the Gods of climate change don't look after idiots. This clip cheered me up.

Then I thought how serious the injuries could have been. We used to have training to use a high pressure fire hose and it took two of us to control the bugger with a proper fireman shouting.
 "Don't panic. Brace (We Braced). Half. (We staggered). Come on boys put your back into it. Full." 
 We almost took off but still had to hit the target dictated by our trainer. We had three goes to pass. The bloody things are heavy and built to last.
These folk think learning a skill is for the little people. Why they thought a vegan tree hugger with a big bum was going to hang on is beyond me. It is very funny. Cheered me up a treat. Perhaps she could have her own television series.....Be a blockbuster. Better than come dancing. First episode could be lifting a fire hose nozzle, thirtieth coping with Grenfell Towers. What is Dick of the Yard thinking? Why do government continue her contract? An untaxed truck can get into the middle of London. Set up and pump. The blasted thing could have been pumping soap and petrol*. Daft sods one and all. 
It gives me hope. I'll sort this Blender Malarkey but I won't ask any of those Muppets for help.

I got some horse pictures.

This is Mouse. He is still getting comfortable in his new home. A friendly beast and a tall lad at 17.3 hands....That's about six feet to his shoulder.

Old body but new truck. This one is state of the art with automatic transmission and auto exhauster brakes. It carried Mouse up from the borders. I hope he appreciates his new abode.

Finally just a bit of messing.

Quad and Stewart and pooper scooper.
Have fun.

* Soap and petrol is awful stuff. Napalm. It sticks and burns. Not a fun combination.

DRESSING.

It's been a busy week. I am still getting nowhere with Houdini but try and give it half an hour a day hoping that something will click. The barley is being dressed and will soon be vodka or gin, possibly even whisky. The lights from the dressing will go to feed the pigs and with a bit of luck some pork chops and sausage will appear. The pigs roam about and are predominately Wild Boar/Black cross so a bit lean for bacon. They are also a bit big so a bath would be required to cure the belly in. 

Truck Mounted Grain Dresser.

A new horse has arrived, he's a big lad at 17.3 hands....that's about six feet high at his shoulder. He is a handsome chap and seems quite gentle, he answers to Mouse a very silly name. I was going to get a snap this morning but the vetenaress was in doing his teeth and he didn't look very prepossessing with a gob full of stainless steel and a dopey tranquillised glaze to his eyes.
I am working hard to create an interesting desktop image in Blender, it utilises about twenty percent of the tools in Blender which is an awful lot of stuff to get my head around. The original concept was created years ago in Cinema 4D. A Czech chap did a Blender version of it but that was years ago and Blender has changed dramatically since then. I'm about four hours away now but what with watching grain dressing and vets doing horses teeth I really don't have that much free time.

This is how it starts out give or take a dozen clicks. You can get the gist of it HERE. Most of the examples show packing spheres of equal size I am aiming for something like this.

As you can see the spheres vary in size and the colour changes from the centre to the circumference. It's not easy working out where the centre of varying volumes is. The background is added in the compositor which ought to be a simple job. I feel like adding some mist or smoke. I know how to do that. This will animate but it takes a while to bake as there is a lot going on. If I swapped the spheres for those AW intersections I showed before then it would make a video intro.
I also had my eyes tested and am the proud owner of new spectacles. These are only a bit stronger but crystal clear. The others suffered a bit over their six year life from angle grinder sparks and weld spatter, I did my best to keep them right and regularly gave them a polish with toothpaste. I can see for miles but was a bit miffed at having to pay VAT on a medical necessity. Good job I got these lenses now as they are Zeiss varifocal lenses and from what I hear will be unavailable after the end of the month. Total eyewash. If I have to pay 10% import duty it will still be a saving on the 20% VAT. What are the odds on our leaders forgetting that VAT was introduced to pay the ridiculous salaries and expenses incurred by the tossers in Brussels and Strasbourg; crazy paying to shift all that lot from one dump to a slightly better dump every few weeks.

Politics and politicians have had a good week; at least one good laugh a day. The best is we are being threatened with a government of Wildebeest, bring it on, they couldn't do worse than this shower. I think they called them GNU as Wildebeest is a big word. I did notice that certain MPs were very upset by the word humbug and that's a shorter word by  four letters than Wildebeest. I guess that four letter words are their limit.

This is a Gnu. A handsome beast and possibly more intelligent than most of the current incumbents of Westminster.
Have fun.