SOWING TIME.

Yesterday or a couple or hours of it were spent popping tyres on a pair of tractor twin rims. They have already started drilling barley but the twin rims will help when spinning fertilizer. They aren't mounted on the tractor yet as the screws on the Highfield levers are too short. As if I hadn't done enough I spent another hour or so collecting stones thrown up by the power harrow. It was dark when I finished so decided to give the gym a miss. the gym is somewhere I have successfully avoided for thirty years so I didn't miss it.
Here are a few adulterated photos.

The pictures are a little dim and dismal. Blame the EUSSR. Nothing to do with me, I'm just a bovine conformist happy to have all life's decisions made for me.

GOOD FUN.

I was awake long before dawn and popped together a quick or not so quick HowTo. It was requested by MARK. He has a posh new printer and needs slices. I was more than a little surprised to find the first trial run with Blender 2.79b worked or was close to working. 2.80 Beta said no.
Here is how to do it roughly.....Very roughly.

The rest of the day was spent changing a couple of tractor tyres and that is a real mauling sort of job. It requires a different skill set and a bit of sweat. Nothing like variety to make life interesting.
Have a good weekend.

I HAVE A BUST.

This bust came as a 3D scan from HERE I am having formatting problems so that is all for today.

LOADING BLENDER 2.80 BETA

It's been a very quiet week here. I thought I'd show you how I get Blender 2.80 onto my computer.

I still haven't sorted the video title overlay as I've found a better way to simplify the text mesh without too much manual labour.
Have a good week. It's looking like being a fun one in Westminster.

A TWO VIDEO DAY.

A few days ago I posted a new video title. It was okay, did the job but it was annoying me so I cleaned up the text meshes. This is what I did.

Previous experience has taught me these will go down like a lead balloon. Not to worry I enjoy making a fool of myself.

WET SNOW.

It is vile here, wet snow and too much of it for March. Bring on a bit of global warming.

Have a good week and keep clear of mosques.

GOOD ENOUGH.

This title sequence is done as far as I'm concerned. It is fully adjustable for colour and opacity. I have found a few tutorials that have got me out of trouble. The main one being here.
BLENDER BINGE . 
He solved the opacity problem which boiled down to using Alpha Clip. Something I have used before and forgot to use this time.
Thanks to NASA  for the images without which this would be impossible. Here are the ones I used and they have been resized so that Blender can handle them.

I didn't use the Albedo one as I didn't want colour. If you make your Earth sphere about 3 to 5 times default size then you don't need to UV unwrap the globe. Just bang the image texture straight in. You may have to swap it's mode from Linear to Spherical but I didn't.
The globe and text will pop over any still or video. I made some quick clouds just to show it off. Very quick clouds. Horrible clouds.

I will get back to gears now.
ADDENDUM:
I thought it was done but I don't like the Lat/Long grid showing on the inside of the land masses. I could delete those bits but it is time consuming and a far from elegant solution. The text mesh is not brilliant but hardly a problem for video and anyway is easily solved. I have made this from two spheres The grid being fractionally smaller, both spheres are children parented to an empty which I then used to animate the earth. Both spheres have a mask, one being the inverse of the other.

I will leave this for a day or so but any help or advice would be gratefully received. I ought to join a forum but the trouble is the young guns there can do such stuff in their sleep and they use wurds I don't fully comprehend. It is never ending is this 3D malarkey.

ORIGIN-ORIGINATE-ORIGINAL.

I am still plugging away at my new video title. I like the concept but often thank heaven I'm not artistic......more spastic if I'm honest.
 I have this wonderful transparency on the globe but would like to see it's edges as it rotates. I looked the problem up and found a tutorial where he introduced a copy of his sphere. He duplicated his world and changed it to wire frame. Brilliant for him, not for me. He must have eight fingers to click with and a ten finger keyboard. One of those very clever offspring of a close family coupling I suspect. Maybe it could be me being thick. My primary school teacher always said I'd end up a bin man. Ignoramus he was it's Bin Person. I'm not that non PC.
 It's funny how productive Blogger can be, I have tried dropping the ocean mask into Photoshop and converting the white bits to 10% grey. No joy at all. As I write this I have had another thought wire frame a duplicate and pop on a mask the opposite to the one that creates this,  I need to reverse it's mask. The mask I had to reverse not two days ago....I'm sure I saved it but where. I initially thought of green for the land bit but it looks awful so I'm sticking with a bluish colour.

 We have acres of Gorse left. This was cleared four years ago. Bastard stuff grows faster than fire.

Lots of gorse left. Three years ago cattle grazed here. Anyway this one is for Trevor.
The latest video title on acres of bloody Gorse.

Tonight we will find out if it's worth voting in the UK. I doubt it is for folk that like independence. For once I was in the majority. Government is crap here. They abdicate responsibility to a referendum and then look for a deal. We didn't vote for a deal. One can't deal with the 
French and Germans. We keep trying but they don't act normal like us. They understand force. The Germans should have been subjugated after their last effort and their country split into it's Fifedoms. Forced to pay reparation. They got away scott freeish. This is how they repay our generosity. Evil sods.
There are some funny folk here. Most employed by the state on flextime. With a telephonist working to the same global time scale. Impossible to find the same contact twice. Most would struggle to get the minimum wage in my real world. Why do we have a minimum wage? I am happy to work an hour for a two dog clip. Cheaper than chips I am.

 The dogs are squinting a bit because they can see. I am poorer by a couple of hours.
Have fun.

MULCHING GORSE.

A twenty tonne excavator mulching gorse. 

The new title works fine now, just not sure I like it.

IN A SPIN.

A quick post today.

I have been playing again and am almost there. I want the world to be transparent and it is a bit. I got the image from the NASA site and had to reduce it's size in Photoshop. NASA images are great, free but too big for my graphics processor. I then made a mask with the ocean black again in Photoshop. It ought to be see through but I'm missing a trick somewhere. Here is progress so far.

I have got confused and can't decide if the world is rotating the right way. Help please.
PS. Transparency issue half sorted I had the mask back to front. Class one Muppetry. Now I only have to make the globe itself see through. Not easy in EEVEE but there will be a way. 

That's better, just needs a polish up now.

REALLY BORING.

About once a week I download the latest Blender 2.80 Beta version. It rarely crashes now if you have things set up reasonably.
It's amazing that one very complex piece of free software can do so much. I use bits of it badly.
 I have been using it's video editor for years and the new version for the last month. I was a little perturbed on earlier versions of 2.80 that they were not developing it. It is fine and getting better. Lots of new things that I can muddle up. I prefer it to Adobe. I like messing so non linear editors are my choice, so much to mess with. So much to bugger up.
I hope the video below will explain how to start to go on with it. Make no mistake it is daunting but rewarding when you suss a bit of it.
 Learning how to use stuff is what I find entertaining. Like all complicated software you have to hunt about to find the quickest way to do things. Don't ignore the boxes or sub-menus there can be gold hidden in them. Personally remembering what and where I left/right clicked is the difficult bit.
 This software is Dutch, from the Netherlands. Will it still be available at the end of this month? Of course it will. The world is far bigger than the EU. Imagine the lovely feeling of not being beholden to the Krauts or Frogs. The Dutch aren't perfect but they do make great free stuff. What good is all our enrichment? Please explain how Windrush was necessary when we were paying folk to go to Australia. Politcians...Incapable of running to the toilet in time.

I know I'm not good at HowToing. Please bear with me. They take ages to do. Even longer to do badly.

Have fun making sense of this malarkey.

LOTS OF SPARKLES.

It is pissing down here. I have lots of bits of video that need sticking together so that's what I'm doing. I am trying to dry out as well. I'm multi-tasking.

RAIN.
It rained and it rained and rained and rained
The average fall was well maintained
And when the tracks were simply bogs
It started raining cats and dogs.

After a drought of half an hour
We had a most refreshing shower
And then the most curious thing of all
A gentle rain began to fall.

Next day was also fairly dry
Save for a deluge from the sky
Which wetted the party to the skin
And after that the rain set in.

I can't credit this as It's something I found a while ago.

The following video sparkles for about forty seconds after that it is just a bit of chat about OVINTA the folk that made the model and some of the many problems I'm encountering.

That's all for now.

IT'S A BACKGROUND.

I've had a busy week. I entered my seventieth year, I had a big computer whoopsey but that is sorted. My desktop has never been so organised. I do create folders for specific files and then for some inexplicable reason I dump all sorts into them. It makes finding stuff a bit of a challenge.
I have several videos on the go and am still enjoying Blender 2.80 Beta. They upgrade it on a daily basis and I get a new version about once a week. It always improves. I have found a different screencast add-on which is more like the old one if not better. It has the odd foreign word but then I'm sure they'll sort that. Loading third party add-ons seems much easier; one can, in most cases, just drop the Zip file in. I found out accidentally, perhaps one always could. This works if you use WinZIP, not tried 7ZIP or whatever it's called but folk on Linux are capable of loading a bit of code. I'm still struggling to get 2.80 to accept maths functions and old Python scripts. There is still no installer but then one wouldn't expect one with a Beta version. If anyone would like a Howtodoit let me know. It's easy once you have done it a couple of times. Today's video is a short attempt at explaining how to use the light from an HDRI without it's image.

Have fun.
ADDENDUM. 06/03/19

I added this image. It needs a mapping node to scale it popped between the Image Texture node and the Texture co-ordinate input. The light on the cube is from the HDRI.

Politicians heading into Westminster.

I have scribbled round the bit that makes the texture. The noise with a bit of jiggling and a B&W ColourRamp can make excellent clouds for a background.