ABOUT ME

I live in a camper van with a West Highland Terrier for company.
My passion is creating images but it is a work in progress.
I am always willing to share what knowledge I have and can be contacted through the comments on this post or e-mail ADRIAN
ALL IMAGES WILL ENLARGE WITH A LEFT CLICK

Friday 31 January 2020

A GREAT BUT NORMAL DAY.

This morning I delivered an excavator to a site the other side of the forest. Came back and was informed that the partying was to be held in Aviemore. I'm too old for Aviemore. They will have sore heeds and I will laugh and laugh on Sunday.

I tend to use Autodesk as a CAD programme but FreeCAD is on my laptop. Look at Autodesk prices and you will see why. FreeCAD is coming on in leaps and bounds but they don't have the developers that Blender have so everything is very hit and miss. It's fine for home use but not for commercial purposes. They have a new fastener add-on but it loads into a separate file. It is probably me as I am a bit dozy when it comes to checking file paths. Once one has got it into the right spot it lets you select screw sizes for metric fasteners of any head configuration but when I plonk them in it pops countersinks right through the part. Easily remedied by going back and doing the job by hand but not really what I have come to expect of a CAD programme. It will draw the threads but again who wants or needs to see them? I do they look pretty coloured in. I also noticed that they have a printer friendly option in one of the drop down menus. I'll investigate this matter further.

I have so many projects on the go so tried to simplify stuff to suit the limit of 16GB of RAM my computer has. I really want to make a virtual time lapse video of Coral or Lichen growing. It's all maths and a real pain. Coral and Lichen don't find it at all troublesome, makes me wonder who is special needs.
Here is a very silly video of me trying to avoid codeing but before I get to that I will give you the node tree I popped together for my playing. I am getting au fait with all this animation nodes malarkey. Hardly have to think what to call up and connect what to what. My nose is growing so I will shut up. In truth it is a real bugger.
The bit highlighted was beyond my computers ability so the following video only has little tubes and not proper ones with wall thickness. I did make a thick tube for it to use but when the computer says no it means it.


Have fun and if you are devastated by us leaving the EU and the Fourth Reich then take consolation in the fact that we proles will never have any effect on government. Democracy is just a myth peddled by our betters. Best to just get on with life and punch gobby leftist retards if they annoy one.
Have fun.



Thursday 30 January 2020

I FEEL HAPPY.

I feel happy, a year from now I half expect to be well pissed off but tomorrow we will party.
Here is a short video executed to my middling standard.


I won't miss the cigarettes my MEP can purchase for £0.70p a packet as the tight wad never offered any. Funny how we all have to pay through the nose for tobacco as it's bad for us but not for the chosen ones. I won't miss all those sponging bureaucrats and the ineffectual MEPs one iota. 

IT'S PARTY TIME.

Wednesday 29 January 2020

A NEW FRIEND.

I've been away quite a lot as there is a bit of a family problem.
I have four or five animation jobs in various stages of disarray. 
We arrived back yesterday and Molly's friend Domingo is back for a week or two. His owner is a Kiwi and a grand bloke. 


I suspect  he is a bit large for a playmate but Moll doesn't seem to either notice or mind. Alf won't tolerate such tomfoolery but wishes he were brave enough to.

That is all I must get back to Blender as I have a celebration video in construction, it has to be ready for Friday so for all the deniers of democracy and lovers of the EU Friday's post might be one to miss.


Have fun.

Tuesday 21 January 2020

JEAN BAPTISTE JOSEPH FOURIER.

Fourier was a French nineteenth century mathematician. I have been trying to link sound to the movement of an object and his name popped up. I had a look at what he had managed to do with basic sine functions and could understand bugger all of it....... I blame Wikipedia so had a look on that American site Wolfram whatsits. At least they explained it but converting it to code was beyond me. You can have a look if you want WOLFRAM.

When one considers that folk think a retard like Thunderbird worth listening to and non mathematicians like that bloke off spring watch pontificating on climate then we have a problem. These folk are so stupid they have to rely on feelings, virtue signalling and the buggers backing them have a big profit and well deserved loot at the end of the day. Pay a few and get thousands to accept the lunacy. The biomass on here is for the main part pulverised trees from Canada. Not a patch on British coal. I'm not surprised as the Canadians have done sod all with the place since we stopped trapping foxes and got kicked out.

You can look at this anytime HERE. Not a pretty picture unless one is raking in billions from the poor to sustain ones dream of renewable. We are okay here as if the grid fails then we have a big gen set overhauled by me. I like messing with big diesels. 
 Sod this unreliable so called green energy. Ask yourself what is going to happen to thousands of non bio-degradable twenty year old turbine blades. I can tell you they will be broken into forty foot lengths and sent to Bangladesh. The Muzzies there are magicians when it comes to waste disposal, they take the money and chuck the crap in the sea.

Anyway here is a GIF of what that cunning Frenchman Fourier came up with, I suspect that snowflakes don't care but it has been expanded by intelligent folk to make graphic equalisers and all sorts of things that baffle me.
At least he had the sense not to include the third dimension. I did say he did it with sines but he cheated and used a cosine. Naughty it's the same as as sine but shifted 90° on the X axis. I'll forgive him as he didn't have a computer. I bet he had a very wealthy brother, lover or wife. I can't imagine working this out with a quill pen whilst looking after sheep.

Have fun.

Monday 20 January 2020

PROJECTOR PROCRASTINATION.

To be accurate I haven't been procrastinating about projectors but delaying writing some script to get a few balloons to dance to music. I was sick and tired of listening to 'Happy Birthday' or more accurately analysing the wave form of Happy Bloody Birthday. Blender doesn't have an audio analyser so I have to skip between Audacity and Blender. I wanted a simple diversion. I got to playing with a projector whatsit method in Blender, this only works in the Cycles render engine and not in EEVEE as it uses Nodes on a light source, EEVEE doesn't support this.....Hark at me! I can remember the time when nodes were an arcane art. I also recall being bamboozled by PS Elements. It's only practise as the doctors say as they practise in their practices.

I found an image on PIXABAY of a pretty young lady and decided to project her onto a quick bit of bumpy stuff.

Here is the quick bit of bumpy stuff. It isn't really this colour, Blender will do this for you with a couple of clicks. It doesn't affect the final render and does make me look both with it and considerate of my audience. I have only known a few abnormal folk that don't like animals and colouring in, without exception they were socialists.

Here is the young lady. There was a snap of a better one but the image was a bit dark. 

I'm away to the CO-OP for some grapes. Bugger the blog post and bugger Blender.
Here is my lighter choice projected onto the bumpy thing. As you can see it's very noisy.


Here she is rendered with 550 samples which isn't enough two thousand would be nearer the mark, this takes my machine about seven minutes or were it a video frame about thirty hours for a ten second clip. It's still noisy. I then recalled reading on a 'Blender Talking in Tongues' forum that there is a new de-noiser in Blender 2.81. It does a good job this is rendered with only fifty samples or thereabouts, popped in the compositor and de-noised, then re-rendered in seconds. I forgot to make a note of the render time but about a couple of minutes tops for both renders and a comparable result.
See.
It isn't quite as sharp, about evens or better for noise. I have plenty to mess about with other than increasing sampling. I could stop smoking in the virtual projection room and cinema for a start. Having said that I like a bit of noise in an image but it is far easier to pop some back than it is to get rid of it.

This is the node set up, quite simple. The render as you can see is not fifty but fifty five. I have used a still image but Render Layers which is the input will happily accept a quick and dirty video render. There are a few little hiccups on the way to this so if anyone is interested I will do a video 'HOW TO'.  You can sweep the projection over any 3D model....A flat plane might be best, these are in sharp focus but if you cuckoo and want a bit of blur then that is only a slider away.
It has kept me amused. I just wish I had the space for a really big posh monitor. 
I saw a YouTube thingy showing a roomful of anally retentive nerds doing this sort of malarkey and everyone of them had two three foot screens and a nice seat. The lassy second from the right had such a wonderful seat I never did get to the bottom of the discussion. Call themselves computer virtual visual artists. Rubbish they are, she ought to have been front and centre. You don't ever see the Hoffs lady from the Bangles getting swapped for a monitor screen whilst some vegan soy boy bangs on about light levels, sound levels, focus, f-stops and composition. The proper image makers know instinctively what to focus on. Susanna Hoffs's bottom. 

Have a good week and have fun.

Thursday 16 January 2020

HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

The video today is a birthday video for Jen as it's her birthday next. I probably won't send her this as it is lacking something, possibly lacking something to the point of being bloody awful. I can easily or reasonably easily animate the 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY' bit to move with the sound but I can't make it rotate all jumpy...must be missing a cunning trick. I can make it get bigger or smaller but that does my head in so I have just gone for a slow rotate. The sound may be a bit loud as I have to use full volume to animate the 'JEN' bit and it needs a re-edit and re-render to drop the volume and fade it out. This is made the old fashioned way but it would be nice to use procedural whatsits and text. I have little doubt it can be done but working out the nodes and scripting to get it done is beyond me at the moment. I also have to consider that some folk have names that won't shorten to three characters. I am working with a frequency spectrum from 0 to 10K; (another thing I can't do is remember the Alt code for '4' or '3' in superscript. I only know '²' and '°' I can't recall everything or much of anything come to think.) I suspect the frequency is split logrythmically by the number of letters. I used the guesstimate method. 'J' is 0-250, 'E' is 250-600 and 'N' is 600-10000. A bad to middling guess but it does the job.


Any artistic or technical criticism would be appreciated as I don't have an artistic bone in my body. If you think it crap then say so as I have another two birthday videos to make this quarter and prefer not to look a Muppet in front of friends.

YouTube has got much better with it's compression but I now have to say whether my videos are for children or grown ups. I will never make videos for the clergy, politicians or the Royals so felt a little discombobulated by this. If I check the box for... It's made for Children then YouTube disables comments and I can't work out how to get them reinstated, it seems even they are confused by all this PC nonsense, I know I am. I suspect next week I'll be a black vegan tiger.

I have another channel or account with YouTube but that is mainly for machines. This video has over twenty seven thousand views. It's an old tractor struggling with a four board Krone plough. This machine is still here and a couple of years ago we split it and popped in a new clutch and PTO drive gears. Easypeasy a two day job once one has ignored all the safety elves, mastered the special words and persuaded farmers to wash their hands and damp the shed floor down before they help.



I never bother with click bait stuff but had I titled this video 'Vegan Tractor' or better still 'The Greta Climate Change Vegan Tractor'. I bet I would be in the millions of hits.

It's probably best not to show vegans the rabbit carnage after a crop is combined. Bet they have never investigated a stubble field or the grain or bean bin on a combine my dogs go doolally for the chance to. Be too messy for a snowflake but there must be macho vegans somewhere, Shirley they can't all be poofy. It would be tealight lighting upsetting for the ones I've seen. Don't worry vegans a chorus of Kumbaya will help the little bunnies to a heavenly future, whilst you gobble their food and profit from their sacrifice.

That is all for today.

Tuesday 14 January 2020

BETTER TESSELLATION.

I am enjoying learning to use the Tissue Add-On developed by Alessandro Zomparelli but I think I need to give the matter a bit more thought as I have managed to stop my computer a couple of times. The issues with Normals I had are cured and for those of you that either pause/ or watch the video full screen and notice some aberrations in the texture during the first wipe transform these are down to the EEVEE render engine. I could render using CYCLES but would have to run the job overnight and not in the few minutes this render takes.

Here is a pretty video. 

I'll include the following screen shot.
The job starts with the yellow Torus which has lots of modifiers on it. I got these from the tutorial it isn't hard but one has to be comfortable navigating in Blender and have half a clue what they are trying to achieve as these posh folk do go quickly. Running YouTube at half speed can help. The blue object is a cube with the faces extruded and then deleted. One selects the cube (it ought to be renamed for clarity, I'm a messy worker) then you shift select the torus and press tessellate, it is top right in the viewport window and found by pressing 'N' and selecting EDIT; Blender does get better but like Adobe, Maya and all powerful software has many annoying idiosyncrasies. Select the resulting purple tessellation, it will be part of the torus, shift it somewhere else and apply a Smooth modifier and a Solidifier Modifier. I didn't do the latter for the video as I had too much sub-division going on for my machine to handle but it does it fine now.
If anyone is interested I'm going to model something a bit more interesting like a proper tiny bit of Coral or Lichen and fathom out how to animate it growing. This is a great Add-On, thank you Alessandro.
Now I must rush, I'm late again for sheep foot trimming duty. It's a vile job but I noticed a couple with Trench Foot yesterday. Not surprising with all the Global Wetting we are having.
I'll be on my bike drecktly poppet.

Sunday 12 January 2020

BASKET BALL.

Yesterday was very wet. I was horseing about and got soaked, really wet. I then had to run Bryony down the road as she is too young to drive, she was wet as well and in a hurry as she had a private maths lesson. No wonder teachers are stressed what with flitting between private work and state work. I bet a pound to a shilling he wasn't wet. I sometimes wonder who is the fool.
 The car is nearly as wet inside as out as I only have a one speed fan. I could get a new thermistor for it but the damn thing is hidden in the depths of the car, possibly just above the exhaust. Bloody things cost pennies. Renault have their good points but accessibility and forward thinking aren't among them, I had to strip the grill just to change a 60p sidelight bulb. I did ask the local garage for a price on popping in a new heater thingy. He just laughed and advised me to swap the car for one with a working blower. Cheeky Donald. Nothing wrong with my £100.00p car but I can see that a days labour would quadruple it's value.

I love messing in Blender. Every time I visit YouTube some intelligent git has come up with something else it can do.
This is the tissue modifier. It is now part of Blender but needs enabling and doesn't show unless one presses 'N' to bring up the view panel and from there select EDIT. Do as I say if you require it as I can assure you special words have no effect on computers. 

Here is the Basketball. This would take a week to model using array modifiers and would be no better than this at the end of ones labour. That is labour with a small 'l', not the one with a big 'L'. They are for the most part actors and other very strange folk who have lots of feelings and very few skills.
As usual I have stolen most of this and the credits are under the video. It isn't perfect and looks to have problems with Normals it hasn't, it just doesn't join the tiles perfectly. 
 This what I started with it is a square sphere so a cube with a few sub divisions as opposed to a sphere like the earth with lines of longitude and latitude.

This is the tile for the weave I used. A posh modelling job for something that appears to be easy. I solidified it after to make this.
The yellow line shows where the the tile doesn't meet up. I can increase the angle in modifiers but it then makes a complete bollocks of the rest. I could also go around selecting edges and joining them but I am not quite that anal The red bits look like a Normal problem and are but as the algorithm is this is as good as it gets. You can hardly tell in a movie.
See for yourself.


That's all for today, have a good week and don't weaken.



Friday 10 January 2020

A NEW TOY.

Life is a bit hectic at the moment. I am trying to learn to write Python. It's very hard as though I pick languages up quickly I struggle to write in them. I struggle putting my native tongue to paper so I ought not to be surprised. I bet I could have letters after my name.
 I am starting to use procedural stuff in Blender, Shader nodes are fine but Animation nodes are so much better as they never pixelate. Blender cannot get it's render engines to accept and render stuff created with animation nodes, I guess that is why they don't incorporate it, the posh coders can't either. I get around this by rendering the viewport. I did think I could render to a file destination by scripting it. I'm almost there. As I pinch the code thingies that Blender chucks up it almost works I guess I'm a close/open bracket away. What sort of bracket is the poser, I have choices (), {}, []. These mean next to nothing to me and that's why I gave up last January.
I have now found a new add-on and enabled it. It's called Tissue. What it does is tessellate a mesh. Nothing complicated as tessellation is just like laying floor tiles....Geometric shapes that don't overlap but fit together perfectly. What it means in practice is that I can create a little bit of say lichen and grow it on any mesh. I love this stuff, does my head in but it is entertaining. I haven't got an example to show you as I keep buggering it up. Next week I promise a simple one. After I sukseeds yu will be bored by dozens, maybe half a dozen as once I know how to do stuff I lose interest.
My internet here was piggy backed from the farm router, it is hit and miss and slow. A camper came before Christmas and had a magic box called a Wi-Fi 4GEE mini. As I use the internet to stay relatively sane and my mobile phone doesn't really work. I didn't think I needed NHS counselling from some twat with a mobile vibrating in it's pocket for lack of mobile communication I took myself off to Halbeath and PCWorld. I purchased this magic machine, only took an hour and a half as the assistant was tinged. Lovely lass but I could see why she wasn't working in McDonald's. I had to use a tablet to enter personal security details. I invented them. If the government/PCWorld let a lovely Syrian near security they are completely barking mad, never mind her typing which wasn't helped by 25mm nail extensions.....Even I know not to work a tablet with my nails on. 
Here is the machine.
 It seems fine, on 4G and with a following wind it will give 600Mb/s it gets a signal here come rain or snow. I get about 10Mb/s download and will still have to use HandBrake to compress video really tiny for upload, no one can tell after YouTube have compressed again. 
Tomorrow I have a grand job, seven horses to muck out and as it is going to be pissing down I can't put them out. Little tinkers will try and intimidate me whilst I wield my fork and barrow but I have special words and must remember to be very careful with the muck fork no matter how naughty they are.
Have fun.

Friday 3 January 2020

A CONFUSING BUSINESS.

In the last post I couldn't get the Union Jack image to tile properly on a stepped status bar.
I had another go this morning and now I have just about got the job sorted. It's far from perfect but as good as I can get it.


Should anyone have advice on how to improve this then I will be very grateful. 

Wednesday 1 January 2020

STATUS STRIP.

It is the start of a new year. Grand it is to be here but it is a bit chilly.
I have made a few resolutions for this year.

  • I will carry on smoking.....Someone has to pay for our NHS or World Health Service as I have heard cynics refer to it. Reprobates who dare to pay for private care think it is the EHS; the 'E' apparently designating employees.
  • I will not become vegan as I like and enjoy looking after Sheep, Pigs and Cattle. It is not my fault that they are made of nutritious lamb, pork and beef. I would also find it very difficult to comply with vegan grooming and dress standards whilst doing anything useful as I think hipster beards look weird and don't suit grey hairs, I can't dye my hair a silly or any colour as I have very little and painting my scalp would be a step too near to lunacy. As for skin tight trousers.......Well they have always been for ladies and poofs.
  • I will not believe so called climate change science or that it is science. Throughout my life I have been threatened with all sorts of rubbish. It started with a nuclear holocaust and crouching down under ones school desk; we were aware then that Mr Mold spent an inordinate amount of time adjusting the girls into the best survival position. Dirty sod.... When that failed the globalists and socialists went on to rising sea levels, global warming, global cooling etc. I refuse to be lectured by Greata Thunderpants or the Royal Wombles. The former is special needs and the latter are just a bit thick/borderline special needs. I will ignore all false prophets and take my chance. 
  • I will hope that we leave the EU and cleanly. Then we can start putting our own house in order. A free trade island off the mainland would be perfect. Ireland is a problem but then when hasn't it been, it's like a sidecar on a motorbike. A pain to drive but they have to remember we have the engine and brakes. The Germans always need a good slapping but the French will generally do as someone tells them. Unfortunately the other EU countries or states as the EU would like them to be will fall in line with the Fourth Reich. Unless Deutsche Bank folds then I can see it getting very messy again. Don't give the cabbage eaters an army or fuel. 
  • I am getting better with 3D stuff but it is and will always remain a work in progress.
  • I really would like to start building single cylinder two stroke engines like the old Maico 450cc engines. I see someone is making a crust building the wonderful Matchless G50 engine from billet. This is but a pipe dream a silly pipe dream, totally unreal, worse than my imagining going for a pie and a pint with Uma Thurman.
Here is a short video. I wanted it to go up and down in steps to reflect the difficulties faced when a population dares to defy the establishment but couldn't UV unwrap the up bits. Or if I did those perfectly the flat bits were all streaky. Bastard.
  Something else to learn.....Bloody UV unwrapping. I tried everything I know......Enough said.
This is the video all flat like a status loading bar. The star spangled sphincter is being replaced by a proper standard, The Union Jack.

I like France but can anyone explain why they have a Foreign Legion, the buggers are foreign.
That's all for today.