PAINTED LADY.

These are welcome immigrants. It is years since I have seen one and this morning there were dozens of them. These were feeding on Privet but I saw others eating Thistles.

 I hope that these are Painted Ladies. They are backlit by the early sun and whatever they are they are more than welcome.
A great find for me. Made my day.

PS. I missed one and don't want to waste it. Had to bin three blurry ones. After all these years I still think in film count.

I see the Greata Thunderbird is sailing to the climate symposium in America. Hows she coming home? That should be fun as it's a fast yacht made of Carbon and Kevlar, it relies on Satellites for navigation and communication; that with it's manufacture probably put slightly less obnoxious gas into the air than she does. Still never miss an opportunity to virtue signal, it's what leftards do. She looks a bit Special to me, a younger version of that nasty twat Jared O'Mara. Not to worry she gives the snowflakes and soy boys someone to drool over. I hope they don't find a hurricane. They can be a bit naughty for a greenhorn sailor. No problem if she's a vegan what comes up will be difficult to distinguish from what went down. Like my dogs she will just lap it up.
Have fun. 

SABRE AND LASER.

I found a dead wasp yesterday, today I have been looking for some living ones. No luck I'm afraid. 

This is a Sabre Wasp, a female. A very impressive insect.

I am still trying to grasp the skills required to use animation nodes in Blender this short video is my latest effort.

Works reasonably well.

Have a good week.

3D MATHEMATICS.

This will be the last post on this subject until I can truly say I've mastered the job. I will continue to hone my ineptitude and try for some Mandelbrot stuff, I'll also try not to bore folk with it until I have it perfect.
Blender 2.80 is now into Release Candidate 2 and seems to be as stable as it should be. I bet even MAYA has minor idiosyncrasies and that costs armfuls of money. I know Photoshop still crashes from time to time.
Animation Nodes will now render without using the viewport renderer.

A check mark against lock viewport interface seems to do the job. Maybe it's a new thing, can't say I noticed it before. As you can see from this screen grab I use blender as a video editor for 90% of stuff. I still use Photoshop to produce GIF files as Blender doesn't support GIF extensions.

 This is a bit of the Wikipedia page for Lorenz Attractors. They are simple differential equations without any naughty imaginary numbers and can be integrated using  Euler integration. It's easy if one has a computer to do the heavy lifting. Bet it was a real sod using a quill pen and parchment. Not that either of them did as both are computer age mathematicians. Like all science, computers have made complicated stuff accessible to the masses and cutting edge pure mathematics provable, or not in minutes for clever folk. Bloody great are computers except when one hits Ins instead of Del. What fuckwit popped those buttons next door to each other? Buttons I want are a keyboard away from the one I last pressed and number lock always seems to be off if I type an Alt Code. I never switch it off....Must be the dogs.

Again the above is from Wikipedia there are just three constants: rho, sigma and beta. Beta is always 8/3. You can ask why but all I can say to you is ."Because Lorenz says so and they are his equations, if you want to make Beta something else then develop your own system." You could also query why a constant is not a constant. It's because we are animating stuff and that is what they do....So shut up.
In the video below I use a Bezier Curve and then animate it with the nodes. I have tried using a mesh primitive but I need more time to sort that sack of spiders. I keep getting muddled up. The reason it changes colour as it iterates is because I pop a material on the curve, it's an emission material node and then coupled up to a colour ramp. It could be all the same colour but most of the experts colour them in and I, for once, can exercise my colouring ins without feeling childish. 
Here is the video.

Have a good weekend and a great week.
I found a dead Sabre Wasp yesterday so will have a trip out to look for some living ones.

BEN HUR THE MOVIE.

The following image is a still from a bit of phone video.

Appalling quality, I'll get some decent video next time I am over there.

BEN HUR........A BIT.

This morning promised some serious entertainment so I loaded up the dogs and headed along to Kinross. The equestrian experts have decided that Toby is too small for the girls he was purchased for or conversely the girls have grown too big. He's a nice pony/horse so a trap and harness arrived for him. He has been pulling truck tyres around for a few days and seemed to have sussed the job. I was expecting a chariot but it wasn't that exciting it didn't have big spiky things on the wheel hubs and was a bit of an anticlimax.
 It wasn't a wasted morning as Toby learn't a new trick. He reverses up to the tyre and gets his back feet tangled in it. He's a gentle beast so didn't kick it to bits but stood patiently whilst the trainers untangled him. He can repeat this trick ad infinitum. I was quite pleased with him, bright for a horse he had learnt it all by himself. It was good fun but I was expecting pony and trap to be a little more photogenic. More like chariot racing.

 I led him up to the top arena......it took a while as I don't do uphill fast and he was hungry so snacked on the way. Suited me. Suited him.

This is a poor excuse for a chariot. I guess it will do for a pony starting out.

The harness going on. Looks very complicated worse than animation nodes. I have trouble with head collars; the buggers can be inside out and upside down, lot's of ways to try and fit them. Even the horses get impatient from time to time. I've often thought that if I just opened the gate or loose box door and said walk on the head collar would prove superfluous. There are a couple need a Chefney bit to stop them disappearing....That is A-level horse leading, very complicated.

All harnessed up and ready to go. Carole had her hat and gloves on so I assumed the trap would come next.........No. Back to the boring tyre.

Here he is trying to be good.

Moll thought it tedious but found some shady crap to roll in. Made her morning if not mine. Filthy little bitch.
It was a good morning. Carole found another baby hedgehog and will take it to the hedgehog lady later. It's mother got run over and this is the third or fourth to be found wandering in daylight. When they are older they will come back here.

A grand little lad. He is drinking and eating so I expect him to survive. Sorry he's a bit blurry but he didn't like the daylight and was scurrying about.
At last we have a proper Prime Minister. Politics could become entertaining again. Can hardly wait for Boris and the tramp to come head to head at PM's question time. Can see it being cruel to snowflake time. Not too cruel I hope as Corbyn is just a misguided terrorist supporting twat. I would hate to see him look more foolish.

THERE AINT HALF BEEN SOME CLEVER BASTARDS.

Unfortunately I was not blessed to be in their number.

I love this song, I enjoy all he did and often wonder what he would have produced had he lived longer.
I wish I were a clever bastard.
I have got into a very entertaining rut. It is pissing about with 3D. Out there there are some seriously clever bastards. It's a wonderful world of which I understand a twentieth....if that.
 I love Blender but animation nodes are a world apart and such a pure mathematical way of making things do stuff in 3D. I have seen superb results from particle animation but they are written in C++. Some are written in summat else and some are pretend user friendly and called JUGAAD. Blow me down, what in the name of Jeremy Corbyn is JUGAAD. I looked it up and can assure you it is something. It is something very clever. Cleverer than a Corbyn and I.
I have been following tutorials from a couple of folk. One is Austrian a Herr Penninger who seems to have reached his limit. The other is an Indian chap. He does node builds and compiles extra nodes and is a real member of the intelligentsia. So esoteric are his compilations that most refuse to load for a numpty like me. I have got his scripts to work after hours of study, I hope.
 This is what Kuldeep Singh does.

It may not look much but I hope I can produce a Mandelbulb or Lorenz whatsit in 3D from his efforts. He is a VFX man, VFX is just visual effects, make believe, I add that for folk that have read this far. I hope he's a man. Difficult to be sure these days without looking down folks pants. He may well be a Zebra or worse a school teacher. I suspect that in the binary world he will turn out to have a willy or not. Pity snowflakes weren't binary educated.
I have managed to load all his stuff. What a load of palavers but quicker than writing script. I'll do a little video of how I dunnit but not until I can make it do it.
Have fun.

ANOTHER QUICK VIDEO.

I am still enjoying trying to create a Mandelbulb in Blender. It will keep me occupied for weeks.

This is an even more impressive animation. It is a little more complicated than a Mandelbulb, easy for me to say as I cannot produce either. It's called a Lorenz Attractor  Fractal and is formed by ordinary differential equations.
I did this video just as a bit of fun.

That's all for today.

SOMETHING ELSE IN BLENDER.

I found this first thing. It's something else I can only work a bit. I am trying. Very trying but if anyone is struggling with computer languages as I am then start simple like this. These are called drivers. Programmers have no end of subdivisions of divisions. I'm happy I like mathematics and didn't take the thicko options at school. Not that I learned much at school. 

Today I had a trip out to Greenock. Bloody depressing. No ships being built but loads of quango office buildings housing folk stopping ships being built. A massive Tesco catering to their unwarranted wealth. Only one ship yard Fergusons left. Not to worry, it's the way of the globalist world. 

Anyway enough is enough here is what I did: It's a bit silly but before I can make a 3D Mandelbulb I have to learn the basics.

EXPRESSION.

At long last this animation node business is starting to make some sense.
Blender 2.80 is almost ready for release, I estimate early next week as the release candidate is out now.
I have been following a couple of tutorials by BlenderDiplom, he goes a bit fast but if I watch them through a few times they work fine when I replicate them.

Wikipedia has all the mathematical expressions required. Once I am happy with the node business I will make some coloured Spirograph style animations.
This video attempts to explain how I got this far.

It's all good clean fun.

A LACK OF GREY CELLS.

I am still plugging away with animation in Blender 2.80. This week has been notable for it's distinct lack of success. Were it easy I suspect I wouldn't be interested and I'd rather be frustrated than bored.

 I think this looks half realistic.

This looks a little more so. A subtle difference. Subtle is not something I would normally associate myself with but this proves that it can occur.
The video is showcasing a differential growth pattern and also the failure of the above flask full of glowing particles. 

That's all for today. have a good weekend. 

A FOURTH DIMENSION.

I am still trying my best to understand animation nodes in Blender 2.80. It is getting very time consuming and a little frustrating. A bit like this.

This is just a bit of fun but difficult to recreate. Nor is it an animation it's just a simple illusion.

I haven't started using Complex numbers yet but have revised my fifty year old knowledge of them. A complex number is expressed as a+bi where (i) is the √-1; a and b are scaler numbers or normal ones. The first two GIFs below avoid such malarkey and only require a bit of normal binary maths, the normal O-level type stuff with a few trig, square, log (or collectively) unary operations thrown in. Many posh patterns like fractals and Julias are enough to make ones brain bleed. I spent years using spherical trigonometry but only to plot a position line on a chart at a moment in time so all was assumed to be stationary. To animate stuff I thought I was going to have to learn to use Euler's formula for expressing a point in 3D space. Apparently his hard work is now obsolete and has been for a hundred years or so he sorted it out in the mid 1700s, his name is pronounced oiler, nothing to do with Euclid who was a long dead when Jesus was born. It gets worse as Euler has a serious flaw that computers dislike. It locks when any two of the three axis become coincident. I now have to learn Quaternions, these were invented by an Irish chap called Hamilton and he wrote them on a bridge in Dublin in 1843, they get round the freezing problem by introducing an extra complex number or a fourth dimension. Blender or Python do support all the above as does OSL and the computer can do all the heavy lifting. No worries....In theory.

This girl is created using 2,500 hexagonal columns displaced using a B&W image cleaned up in Photoshop. It could do with twice as many at least but it was slowing the machine down and I am impatient.

This is an animated Trefoil a Mobius type thingy. The node trees for both are massive but the logic is manageable.
The next three are far more complex and require me writing Python script which like all computer stuff appears to have had a bit of an update (*) no longer means multiply I have to use (&) now. I think.

Wonderful This will keep me entertained for years if I don't become disheartened. I can do a little bit of programming but converting °C to °F doesn't impress the headbangers in the programming stratosphere. The little tinkers are even scripting their own special nodes unfortunately I can't just copy and paste their script because I don't know how......Yet. Quite possibly I never will. I do know Ctrl C and Ctrl V but it appears to be more harderer than that.
Just to add to my tribulations I was forced to update Photoshop as it refused to accept Save GIFF files. On top of all this I couldn't read my script in the Blender text editor. Was holding a magnifying glass up to the monitor until I had a brain wave and increased the scale in preferences.
Who would have thought modelling a shed in 3D would have got me in this mess?
Have a good weekend.

FIFE HERITAGE RAILWAY PART TWO.

Fowler Road Roller I suspect this looks ten times better than when it was built in 1925.

Austin 7 van built in 1928.

Austin A40 Pickup circa 1950.

 Leyland Cub 1936.

A Seddon Atkinson from 1948 with a superb Gardner 120 engine.

One for the eco-loons. I suspect they are burning old tyres in the firebox or have got some crap German coal. At least the site is litter free unlike the shithole the lefties made of Glastonbury. Dirty buggers.