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

Monday 15 February 2016

IT'S FREEZING. (15/02/16)

It has been a grand, sunny couple of days and today looks as if it will be similar. yesterday I found some more Hair Ice and also a few flowers for Valentines day. It was great out but very slippery.
I found a tiny pine tree growing on the stump of an old one.
Here are some flowers for Valentines Day, the first Snowdrops I have seen this year.

I am still playing in Blender but I'm afraid I got distracted once again. I started playing with visual effects in video or VFX as it's called. To say I got in a tangle is an understatement. The new shed is coming along and the walls look okay to me, they are stone and distressed plaster, the ceiling I'm half happy with. Here is a very quick render and a look round the empty shed. I'm thinking of modelling a whisky still and fire to pop in it along with a few barrels.
This is a very quick render as to do it properly would take a day. Eight minutes a frame it is running at but I'll go through it all and try and reduce the vertices. This is a single frame rendered at 50% and 500 samples. It is my best effort yet.

Enjoy your week.

31 comments:

  1. That first hair-ice image is wonderful, Adrian - looks like it's a 1960s wig!

    I love your images of the pine sapling and the snowdrops. I'm extremely impressed by your shed - it's looking very realistic.

    Have a great week!

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    1. Richard, the ice is half the size of Saturdays but better quality.
      Just realised I put the beams the wrong way round. Not to worry.

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  2. Icy flowers and a bunch of hair, brilliant images Adrian. I love the bricks and wood dancing!

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    1. Cheers Bob, it is cold here at the moment.

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  3. That's a sturdy looking shed Adrian, I could do with one like that, although mine would be quickly filled with junk, no room for any hooch I'm afraid.
    Amazing stuff that Hair Ice...[;o)

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    1. Trevor, I suspect that the whole business is getting out of hand. I sometimes wish I'd never heard of Blender.

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  4. The hair ice is fascinating. I've never seen it. Thanks for the introduction! The flowers are incredible there with the cold.

    You are making great progress on Blender. Have a great week.

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    1. Marie. it is quite rare but I have got used to looking for it.

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  5. I admire your stick-to-it-iveness re Blender. I personally enjoy your photographs more, however.

    I do have a question. Where is the sun exactly? To me it seems there are two sources of light in the shed picture, based on the windows, the left one from the left and the right one from the right. or perhaps the shed is on Tatooine (from Star Wars) and not Earth? I still am mighty impressed with your work.

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    1. Bob, I thought I'd matched them up but see your point. There is a virtual sun off to the left. There is a world texture which in any 3D scene is a 360° sphere around the centre of the subject. It emits light unless it's black or 0,0,0, as blender calls it. It does have a sun in it and I'll have another look where I put the building in relation to the world sky. As an aside White is 255,255,255. It is really 256 but computers count zero as a number.

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    2. If you remember my post about hexadecimal (base 16) arithmetic in computers awhile back, 255 in decimal in hexadecimal is FF in hexadecimal which is a base 16 shorthand way of expressing the binary value of 11111111 (all ones) which is 2 to the eighth power minus 1. This makes perfect sense to me to me as a computer programmer. White is all zeroes, black is all ones, and all other colors are represented by values between those two extremes. Have I thoroughly confused you? Sorry, I just couldn't help myself!


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    3. Or rather, it's the other way around, isn't it? Black is all zeroes (the absence of all colors) and white is all ones (the presence of all colors).

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    4. Bob Most if not image creating software uses RGB which has 256 units for each channel. I also use RGBA where A is an alpha channel for use when compositing transparent backgrounds.

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  6. It is so nice to see snowdrops, which I actually seldom see in real life. My dad had some years ago, but I have never had them in my gardens and don't know anybody who does.

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    1. John, they are common here especially in woodland.

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  7. I have never seen hair ice... Wouldn't have believed it. Amazing stuff. There are parts of the rainforest here in which ALL new grown is parasitic or symbiotic. The flowers are veddy priddy.

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    1. Bill, it would be good to see some rainforest images.

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  8. Love the hair ice and the snowdrops. Very artistic photography.

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    1. Karen, very cold photography lying down on snow.

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  9. The hair frost is so delicate and fragile looking up close. It really is fascinating stuff.
    I live the bonsai tree too

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    1. Douglas, it always grabs my interest. I think the red squirrels must have planted the tree.

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  10. More hair ice envy from the other side of the world!

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  11. Preciosas las flores a pesar del frío Adrian. Sigue practicando con los videos te salen muy bien .
    Un abrazo.

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    1. Laura, a veces me gustaría que nunca había comenzado. Si no experimento Nunca voy a encontrar la manera de hacer que funcione.
      Lo hice en Google. Puede ser basura.

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  12. The hair ice is a fascinating structure.
    The shed is really coming on with its beams, stone walls and light fittings.

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    1. John, it has come on a fair bit. I now have to get render times down from days to hours. I will do a boring post on it. The light fittings are easy but need a guard over the bulb I know how to do that. The stone walls are a bugger. I have two walls with two materials, one with a bumpy mesh but then the windows don't line up. Blender is complex but no worse than spherical trigonometry I can remember as a cadet being baffled by the calculations involved in solving PYZ triangles. I got as far as being able to do it quick sticks and being able to programme a Psion to do it. Well nearly. It didn't work on minus values. So really didn't work. Much like this I have now polished it up a bit but I'll show you in a couple of days.

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  13. Yes, it does look like it is freezing!! It makes for great photos though. Stay warm!!

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  14. Lovely snowdrop picture Adrian. Did you have to get down on your belly to take it? Passers-by might have thought you were making love to Mother Earth. This probably explains earthquakes.

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