HALLOWEEN.

I have never had anything to do with Halloween other than giving children a boiled sweet and threatening to rip their heads off if my bin isn't exactly as I left it. 
I'm have doubts wishing folk a Happy Halloween, it's not an expression I have heard before but there's a first for everything.

Have a good day tomorrow.

DISLECKCIA

It's been a funny few days. Thursday I had a run down to St. Andrews and the seaside. I wanted to get some video of waves but they were fiddling and small, no shipwrecks, nobody drownded, in fact nothing to laugh at, at all. I  took the tripod and camera; even remembered a spare battery but forgot the lens mounting plate. The dogs met a King Charles Spaniel who was on an extending lead and it wanted a play but was tying it's mum in knots. She was a delightful Polish or maybe Lithuanian lass who wanted to know why I was taking pictures of the empty sea. We chattered away and I explained I had forgotten the mounting plate. She explained why she kept her dog on it's lead.
"It want to play with every dog we see which is excellent but she only play for five minutes and then she fuck off and jump in sea, then she try and bite me when I scrub her with towel".
I couldn't help laughing at the unexpected profanity and even she found it funny when I explained why I was amused.

Friday. Jen popped up from Edinburgh on her way to Darlington so I was very appreciative. It adds a good three hours to her journey. We had a grand chat and catch up. She came laden with presents, fruit cake, cheese, dog treats and whisky. My sort of lass if I wanted another wife I'd beg her to marry me. Muchty pub is open again but not yet doing food so another disappointment. Jen left full of the apple turnover she had brought with her.

I have been really trying to make Alcove part Two but am having big problems. To put it in a nutshell I am struggling to drop the alcove model into a wall. If I'm honest I have been in a right tangle with Blender all week.

Here are a few images of my messing.

St Andrew's Beach. Very subtle posterisation. I then tried to do the same to the video of which the above is a still and it collected all these artifacts. I wasn't best pleased.

In fact I was boiling cross. I will leave this malarkey as a pastime. It is making me really angry. I must be really thick. I must have re-connected a node I had discarded but can I find it can I hell. I must learn some new words or work much more tidily.

Alcove Part two is done after a fashion. It is stuck in a wall which I found the very devil of a job. I have never had much luck with Blenders Boolean whatsits so I went into the face menu and used knife, I then had to rebuild faces and muck about with normals for ten minutes,

 Here it is stuck in a wall....Great.

Not so great the little black shadow thingy shouldn't be there. I can't work out what is causing it. Bother, Bother Blow. I bet it is all down to Brexit or Trump. I wish I could be a Leftard and blame someone or something else for everything.

Both the wall mesh and the alcove mesh are reasonable. I must be dislexsic.

Don't forget to put Your Cock Black tonight. 

A PASTIME.

This is very similar to the posterizing I did but it is a tractor and not an attractive lady.

The first segment is the node tree I used and then the original video followed by a pencil sketch interpretation and finally some colouring in. The singing isn't me it's a wonderful lady called Amy Sayer and the song is from the Wild Tape.
John at MIDMARSHJOTTINGS inspired me as he did a similar thing and he did his whilst driving so much more complicated and better.
Have fun.

THE REVEREND WILLIAM SPOONER.

Ever since I got my mew nouse on Saturday I have been trying to get a good simple alcove. The mouse is a fit bast but the following HowIDunit is in real time. I have always speeded up previous Howtus. I still do the voice over afterwards as the audio input driver on my laptop has been acting the fool. So has my GPU but after two goes at reinstalling the driver for it it seems to be behaving itself. I ought to offer my services to folk with driver trouble. I'd prefer to offer my services to nubile young ladies that aren't in trouble but those days are long gone.
This is supposed to be a tutorial and I healy rope I haven't forgotten anything. I know it isn't up to the standard of most on YouTube but the more of them I do the better I get.
Whilst waiting for YouTube I noticed this little splash of theirs.

I think they are packing the tiss. My premier would be very intimate with all three viewers.

Here is the Alcove video it is about 8.5 minutes long. I hope someone learns something from it. It's a cunning stunt.

It is 2K and is best watched at the best resolution your broadband will tolerate. I did compress it in Handbrake but only from 110MB to sixty odd. It should be fine at 1K or 720 I think they call it.
Have fun and ask when you need clarification.

MAN AND MOUSE.

A couple of weeks ago the scroll wheel on my mouse started acting the fool. It is an old mouse and the rubber covering had worn through.  I gave it a clean, I treated it to a squirt of brake cleaner but alas it was all to no avail. I started looking at mice on PCWorld and Amazon. Hundreds of the wretched things so I decided to choose on size and price. Big and cheap.

Here it is and it works fine. The instructions are written on a sheet of A4 and a bit paper which is folded up to fag packet size; they are in about half a dozen languages and I wouldn't normally bother deciphering such things. I stuffed the USB bit into the laptop, loaded a couple of batteries and then noticed it has a couple of buttons on the side and one on the top behind the scroll wheel. I tried to read the instructions but the writing was far too small. I found my magnifying glass and learnt that the one on the top is for adjusting CPI. What in the name of all rodents has the consumer price index got to do with my mouse? As it turns out absolutely nothing, It means Counts per Inch and is a measure of sensitivity. I can now set it very high and click on the wrong thing faster than ever before. Well not worth the £13.40p delivered for that feature alone. I will have to take a macro shot of the words and music to make sense of the other two buttons. Maybe I'll just forget them. If I'm really lucky one will do Ctrl Z and the other something else useful like disabling Caps Lock. The latter is a button I regularly hit in error and then spend five minutes wondering why shortcuts don't work as expected, if at all.
I am still interested in the alcove but have started again as I can't get the render time down to less than a couple of minutes a frame, That's without a bit of Halloween mist swirling about. I have now devised a much cleaner mesh and will learn how to bake materials. If you are really lucky I'll do a bit of video showing howIdunit.
Have a good week.
PS. The forward button seems to lock the scroll wheel for fast scanning and the aft one is a perv button; it gets rid of the porn screen quick sticks and pops things back to the browser screen. Wonderful. I suspect it works on screens other than porn. I'll experiment if enough folk are interested.

FOLK ARE DIFFERENT.

In all the turmoil of the world we live in the seasons remain the same.

Not a good year for autumn colour but half reasonable.

I love thinking of ways to model 3D stuff. This is my state of the art.

A really posh alcove in a wall. I'm hoping to make a movie out of this. Ignore the top bit as that produced this. I'm fighting for a super clean mesh for animation.

Needs more work I think. Put in crap get crap out.

 I am not averse to one click solutions. If one in a thousand folk think; I've used one, I'll delve deeper then the jobs a goodun. If they are satisfied then likewise.

A child who is a right little sod showed me this. He suffers from (INAGS.)* Many children seem to suffer from such things, I did and my son did; it's normal. They have letters after their name before they have left primary school these days. He understands things intuitively Look at this.

On the left is Blenders sphere mesh an on the right is what he came up with it's a cube with a sub division surface modifier. Bloody genius level computing as it makes for clean meshes.

* INAGS stands for:  I Need a Good Slapping.

Have fun.

.

PALLY SOMETHING.

Not much to report I'm afraid.
I have been thinking of going on one of those attention seeking diets. A lass I met is a vegan. I decided to adopt an Iron Age diet of berries, nuts and other stuff lying about; being ecologically sound I have had to pop the Pally whatever she said it's called on hold as despite diligent searching I can't for the life of me find a Woolly Mammoth or even a Sabre Toothed Tiger to tide me through the winter. Air freighting berries seems a bit counter productive. 
Last week one of the hens died peacefully in it's sleep. Here it is alive and well.

It's a shame but both hens are very old and it had a good life here.
I am still in Blender mode and got distracted as usual.

I was messing with ambient lighting and found that if I used a plane emitter with a picture on, it did this. 

You don't have to show the light source as you can simply deselect it from the camera. I've popped a yellow scribble round the bit you uncheck. I can't for the life of me think of a use for it but I found it interesting.
I've got a bit further with the castle gate. Really sharp points on my portcullis, which should impale any slow invaders. Boiling oil should deal with any the spikes don't get.

It wants texturing properly but I'm saving that bit as I enjoy colouring in.
Have a good week.

WHAT A PALAVER.

I have been out revelling in the autumn colours. They aren't at their best yet so I decided to make my own tree. I wish I'd never started. It took me dozens of goes, all bar two being failures. My Muppetry was unsurpassed; yesterday evening I was all for uninstalling the Modular Tree add-on from Blender but decided to give it one more go this morning, I had been selecting the particle system for the leaves using 'A'. It worked when I just right clicked.
Here it is.

The second is a magnified bit of the first. It's not too shabby. I could give the lighting a bit of a shove but these 3D models would be fine as the camera zips past. It is only pretend.

A few more pictures from round and about as winter approaches.

SPRAYING.

HEDGE CUTTING.

 THE FIRTH OF FORTH.

LOOKING FROM MY DOOR.

That's all for now. Have fun.

ADDENDUM:

Looks a bit smarter.

A START.

Looking at the comments on recent posts I noticed that someone wanted a door in the shed and another would like to see a castle. I have made a start. I've actually got a bit further than this but as I'm hopeless at showing how I stumble through creating 3D stuff I decided that there is a limit to what folk would tolerate.
Here is the video, I did this twice as the blasted empty I was using as a manipulator refused to play. I must be buggering something up but I'm blowed if I can work out what.

I will carry on with this job as now I've got a doorway I can scale it and alter it to make windows alcoves and doors..............That's my cunning plan.
Have a good week.

WHEN THERE IS ONLY ONE OPTION LEFT.

This is a carry over from the last post. I have tried to posterise a bit of video. I don't really know why as I have never been impressed by this sort of thing.
I was getting nowhere fast, I loaded an image into Photoshop and had a run through dozens and dozens of the artistic filters residing there. Back into Blender and again I was disappointed with the results. There was only one option left............Read the bloody instructions. The Blender manual is a mine of information but reading and understanding are often poles apart.

Most of this could be written in Hottentot for the sense it makes to me. I got the gist of it as they kindly included a picture.

I have an idea for one more video like this but using Photoshop. I'll then move onto something else. Probably the something else will be equally silly.

TWO NEW TOOLS.

I'll start with a short video of me trying to emulate an effect John at MIDMARSH JOTTINGS has created. His is better than mine but I am on the right track: I hope.

Last week a new implement arrived. It's a grand bit of tackle. If you don't know then have a guess what it is. The answer is at the end of the post.

Here it is after it has done a few hectares.

That's all for now.

It's a Sub-Soiler.

UPDATE
Had A siesta and came back to the job. Much better now.

 BEFORE.

AFTER.