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

Saturday 31 January 2015

PEASANTS. (31/01/15)

Yesterday was sunny and showery with a top temperature of 3.5o C. It was cold and wet and I was sure that the Wild Goats, Red deer and all manner of wonderful mammals would be wandering around at low level looking for easy food. I saw some Deer tracks and a few Rabbits but nothing of the wee beasts themselves.

I did meet Vicky, sister to my current lust Alex. She said. If you dare take my photo dressed like this you are dead. She had come to sort out the drain on the thermal recovery unit. That’s what she does when she isn’t being an artichoke or whatever she said she was on Burn’s Night. I hid behind the camera and took a shot. I showed her later and she wants a copy. She says it makes her look connected. Connected to what other than muck and the ground I’m not sure. _MG_2515   Vicky on her way to sort a drain or two. She was actually on her way to supervise the men who had been sorting it for a couple of days. She got there, banged on their van roof, causing them to spill their coffee and ripped into them in a most unladylike way. I loved it but blame the internet for making her aware of so much language, even if some of the things she threatened were going to be difficult without committing murder. I’m not sure about pressure gauges but shovels would not fit where she suggested they were going if they hadn’t got their fat arses away to the job in two seconds.

I did get a thump but not for the photo. I said I have always liked Ugg boots but yours are wonderful, more durable. She called me a peasant. She’s kind.

I have got the latest version of Blender 3D. I didn’t realize but I was using a year old beta version of 2.72. It was okay but when I wanted to extrude selected vertices on the ‘Y’ axis I had to tell it to do it on the ‘Z’ axis. I now have a stable release of 2.73. The fluid simulation is now almost an automatic thing. It needs a twiddle here and there, there again, here again but it is brilliant compared to 2.68. It even provides a Node editor half filled in. I just wanted to add fire to smoke. Blender like Adobe is perverse. Fire and smoke doesn’t do it. I just went to Fire and bingo the fire is at the bottom and the smoke is at the topish. I moved the emitter down. The emitter is just a wee circle and you have to fill it in. I think you have to make it a Ngon. Then give it a clouds texture and piss about with that until You get random flames and smoke. Had I more monitors or bigger ones I’d show you. No I wouldn’t cos it looks a bit naff.

The reason I couldn’t get a trail of smoke and sparks on my New Year GIFF was because I’d messed up and had also not Baked them first. My little sparks were still meshes and if one gets a thousand of them or so and an explosion of another five hundred then it buggers the job up. Baking is just Rendering but you can do little bits, select which bits and work on them after. A full render would take hours if not days. My first 3D Render took all night and still wasn’t done. Now I do it in little bits. Mostly the wrong little bits but if I’m still here in a year I’ll be quicker. Blender Guru and some others. The words just roll off their tongues. Brilliant they are but I know I have to learn the words. I’m a peasant.

   Chinese New Year is nineteen days away. I am going to have a roaring campfire and the mortar bomb type fire works streaking into the sky in the background. Fat Chance but I will try. I’ve modelled the logs and will have some burning, some glowing and some just emitting smoke. I have a 200o panorama all UV mapped to a bumpy little landscape.  My use of the Node editor whilst not instinctive is coming on, it has to be learnt as it is the only way to use cycles render and not the internal Blender Render. There is so much that is good in 2.73. Variable Boundary box is great, it cuts Bake times by three quarters, I know I should but I don’t; this is the first time I have had read release notes. I had to look up half of what they were banging on about in Wikiblender or whatever. I learnt a lot. Should have read Adobes years ago. The downside is that it will still only process fluids through the CPU and not through the Graphic processor. Come on you Blender developers get your fingers out. Come on Adrian; shut up you know nowt  and you know none of your readers are interested.

I was gobsmacked with the praise for yesterdays Peasant. She is beautiful.

_MG_2499    Here she is again or most of her. The bits of her I got are fine. She is almost there but I’ll call her a Peasant.

20131031    For those that couldn’t find the bird here is the answer. Tree Creepers are the devil to spot until they move. I’ve enlarged it a bit and popped a red ring round it. Pity the damn bird can’t do the same. The wonders of computers and digital. I spend half my waking hours manipulating digital images and the other half inventing them. What I do in the four hours I sleep is my own affair but a pound to a penny and a bit of luck young Vicky will feature.

Have fun. Enjoy Sunday. Back to Blundering in Blender for me.

24 comments:

  1. Good luck with the new version of blender. I'm still using 2.69. I actually rolled back to this after an automatic update as the newer version was messing up a whole bunch of my models (boolean operations doing weird things), and as I don't need any of the animation or rendering stuff I'm going to stick with what works for now.

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    1. Mark, I find it incredibly complex but excellent value. I use it to create wee Giff files but have got a commission for a little corporate job. I have only Adobe to compare it with but I tend to use Blender and then drop it into Adobe for the final tweek and render. I would drop it into Fusion but I can't work that yet.
      It is freeware but monitored. I'm surprised it messed anything up. If I could write Python and understand it I'd consider myself a star bar. I bet it was the 'Z' & 'Y' axis thing that cuckooed.
      Yesterday I spent four hours making sticks for a fire. They have to be separate sticks as some have to be given emitters to glow at the bottom of the fire and some have to be solid so the smoke and fire whirls round them. I cheated I made eight sticks on three layers and saved the little buggers. It's hard making bits of sticks. I have never liked Ortho view but in the new version I can Shift+B select vertices in edit mode. And G and whatever axis pulls them out. A quick scale and they taper. I even increased the mesh selected on one cross bit pressed 'O' and G and got a little bump on my branch. Briliant I was well chuffed. I'm not that happy that it won't bake or render fluids on the GPU.

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    2. I've had the axis switch issue before. The problem, when it's happened to me at least, is that I've forgotten to apply a rotation before trying to do the next operation. The axis for an object seems to be fixed regardless of which way it's orientated. I tend to rotate until I'm happy and then apply just the rotation, leaving my then free to scale and move in the same axis as every other object in the scene.

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    3. You have sussed it. I had to selected Ortho view but preferred selecting front view and scrolling round it, didn't work. I hate ortho so only used it to select vertices. I don't need to do that now.
      Hey Ho; we are free again. Till the next big hiccup.
      I am amazed that no one else in blogland has mentioned it. The shift of axis is serious it means Ctrl Z and try another and more important remember what worked.

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  2. " If you dare take my photo dressed like this you are dead..." You should have invited Vicky into your love wagon for a private photo shoot - then she could have dispensed with her work attire - leaving only the Ugg boots on.

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    1. YP. Its a sad state of affairs when they think I'm harmless.
      Look closer she is wearing riggers boots. I Know what they are but in my dreams thought the foul mouthed little darling would look better in Ugg. I am stopping with her grandpa. So I'll try not to dribble too much.

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  3. What a woman! And I love your female Pheasant, there another like yesterdays.

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    1. Bob, this is the last of the the Pheasants Yes same as yesterday but snowing her good side.
      Vicky is drop dead gorgeous.

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  4. Vicky appears to be all business, and a good thing she did not kill you for taking her pic! I had to skip over the Blender stuff because I am a dense arse about that..have no idea what you are talking about. Oh well. The pheasant is gorgeous and that is a lovely capture..hopeful that the bird does not curse you for snapping it's pic!
    Have a super weekend, and I will go study up on Blender so next time I won't be such a huh? about it. :) .

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    1. Terri, everyone has trouble with Blender but it is a very powerful bit of software. Unless you have a Graphics card and lots of RAM it will just stall or take hours to do even a partial render. Rendering is just a word for converting a 3D model to a 2D image that can be filmed. The camera is built in as are the lights. It's just fun.

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  5. I would guess that we walk by 99% of creepers. We can walk right by the deer and moose here as they stay still in the bush and you rarely see them. It's a good thing your friend knows how to handle a work crew because I'm not sure if she knows about getting photographed.

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    1. Red, she didn't when I took it but she does now. Creepers are little devils to spot.

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  6. The pheasant is in lovely light, and not seeing the whole bird can be a good thing, artistically speaking.

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    1. John, it looks better as an image for not being all there.

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  7. I love the Girl in the Yellow Mac! And the tree creeper.

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    1. Frances, somewhere I have some reasonable Tree Creeper shots. I really ought to file stuff so that I can find it. No chance after all these years of being disorganised.

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  8. Vicky sounds like a character I could build in one of my novels and be ecstatic over. (I must say I love all of my characters.)

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    1. R. Mac, they are a family of characters. Never short of an opinion.

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  9. Photos wonderful as always. I can't get into the minutiae of your camera obsession though. It's all beyond me.

    However, as Your Own Incurable Self-Appointed Editor, I must mention that in the second sentence of your first paragraph, the phrase you were looking for is "all manner" and not "no manner". You're welcome.

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    1. Bob, it's not an obsession just a hobby. A hobby that seems to occupy half my waking hours.

      Thanks I've corrected it. I really ought to send you a draft before I publish.

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  10. Buena vista para pillar a es pajarillo en el árbol está muy camuflado;))
    Un abrazo.

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    1. Luara, son imposibles de ver hasta que se mueven.

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  11. Sometimes I wonder why I read every word of your technical stuff which is both beyond me and of no interest to me most of the time. Life can be very strange sometimes. Mind you if I stopped reading the techie stuff I might just miss the good bits.

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    1. Graham, I know it is boring but sometimes the things it can produce are interesting. I'll try to stop writing about it.

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