WIN SOME LOSE SOME.

I saw a clip showing some bloke weightlifting this week....Nothing odd about this unless you think it normal for him to be competing against ladies. The labour leadership debates seem to follow much the same pattern. Monty Python was not supposed to be anything but satire.

I have had a bad week Blendering. I found a new Animation Node called Decompose Text. It is in development and Animation Nodes are still experimental. When it's sorted it will make complex video titles easier and a bit more repeatable than they are presently. I can make it work but there are many glitches which looking at the forum are being sorted. I'll have another go in a week or so.
The following video is something I started last Halloween. I forgot all about it but I have got it half working so will add a few gravestones and get it flitting about them with a bit of volumetric mist.

  

I see the Doom Goblin is in Bristol today. Pity about the weather but at least folk attending will get a wash.
Have a good weekend.

YOGA.

This is a change but don't worry I haven't gone vegan or decided to embrace the
"Save the planet from things we can't control." brigade. I leave that to loons, virtue signalling 'Z' list celebrities, Royals and politicians. These folk though disparate are not mutually exclusive.

I now have a book on Python, the code, not the endangered snake. It is part of the computer science course at Glasgow University. It is very difficult but easier to understand than the mental state of whoever named a snail after the Grotty Thunderbird lassy. I kid you not. I just start to think folk have reached peak retard then along comes a snail called Craspedotropis gretathunberga. I haven't seen one but from the name it appears to like warm places. That rules Scotland out as a habitat.
 I was frozen this morning, horseing about in torrential sleet and a howling gale then to cap it all I noticed a couple of sheep down. I did consider concentrating on something really stupid like banning firewood but succumbed to reality, climbed the gate and popped them the right way up. Horrible, heavy, soggy beasts are wet sheep. Ungrateful to boot which will make me feel better about enjoying my Barnsley chop tomorrow evening.

Here is a short video. 

 This took a ridiculous amount of time as the 3D model from TurboSquid is very large and has a horrendous poly. count. I have been messing for a couple of days on and off. I like the result. I don't like the point lights reflecting in the floor but I tried small area lights and they didn't illuminate the girls middle very well.
These computer graphics folk must have the patience of a saint. It is possible they know what they are doing but I don't really believe they do.

Have a good weekend.

GREWSUM THINGY.

This is much the same as yesterday but with a bit more going on. I have ideas for improving this.
The background is supposed to shimmer as if the video is underwater. It just shuffles about. I'll try it with a noise modifier on the wave form. I find one can't do without noise and cloud nodes, they hide a multitude of sins.

As you can see this is just a sine wave and I didn't even have the wit to offset one to the other.

It starts out as this 3D model of Brain Coral. I got this free from TURBOSQUID. They have loads of 3D meshes, not all are free and not all are Obj. files which you need for blender.  Yesterdays Seahorse came from the same place. This mesh is far too complex but after a couple of runs through the Decimate modifier I got it to a manageable sort of quad size. As you can see I am now set up to select a vertex and have it's index number display. Took me a while but then nothing or precious little in computing is simple.
Here is the video.

 I hope to expand this idea by making a few of these, I'll make them all different and render them with an Alpha channel. I can then get them to swim about as they grow and with some DOF on the camera things may get more interesting. 
I was out this morning but try to stay in as it really isn't nice out. At least I get time for this malarkey. 

GUESS WHAT.

Today's video is a quick demo of the Shortest Path node in blender. Now I can do it I'll do something more spectacular.

Blender 2.82 is now out properly and so has an installer. I don't really know why I popped a moon in. I just wanted to see how it rendered as it is going in a birthday video. I think it renders fine for video.

This is the node tree. The bit in yellow gives the start mesh vertex numbers. They are easy to display once one knows how to get to them. Go to Edit> Preferences>Interface> Display> check Developer Extras. Then whilst in Edit mode go to Overlays> Developer> check Indices. Alternatively you can write a couple of lines of code which would take me a week. Possibly a day with a fair wind.

 Here they are in yellow. The bit scribbled round in pink is nothing to do with the animation. It just allows you to see the selected vertices.
I will do a posh version of something using this node.
I hope you all survived the storm. It was a bit wild here last night and Muchty is cut off from us. Not completely I could drive round about six miles.
Have fun.

PS.
Is this legible? I know what it says so can't really tell.

I suspect some more geometry and a thinner bevel on the curve would not go amiss.

CRACKED IT.

I have got a result. This mesh would make a good 3D print one could then attempt to paste a Google map onto the surface. 

This shows Loch Linnhe with the start of the Great Glen branching off to the right, it eventually arrives at Inverness. I wasn't thinking straight as I missed Ben Nevis, it's off to the right about where those grey bits are. I'll do Ben Nevis and fly a camera about it, not two close as Google imagery is not very high resolution. 
Got there in the end, GIS does work.
I'll pop a video together but first I have to go out horseing before the rain arrives.

TOPOGRAPHY DOESN'T WORK. IT'S THE TORIES FAULT.

The other day I found an add-on for blender called GIS. I was a little disappointed with the result. This is better in one respect but doesn't deform the mesh. No reason why it shouldn't with a bit of thought. Most things are possible given time. Usually quite a lot of time in my case. The images are available here OPEN TOPOGRAPHY and how to find a way through the confusion of OpenTopography is here at Steven Scott. Now I think I may have fouled up as I'm not getting real height information translated into the mesh. I blame Donald the Tories and Brexit but suspect I will have to pop serious sub divisions on the plane bit.

If you click on this screen grab and look at the node tree I really ought to have and deserve to have a 3D terrain, but I don't and so far can't work out why. I feel like Orville the duck or a lefty, it can't possibly be me being thick, it is impossible for it to be my fault. I stay roughly where the yellow dot is, the blue bit above is the river Tay.
These are the NASA images.

Nothing wrong here as far as I can see. This topography malarkey has grabbed my attention and NASA do release much higher resolution stuff for free linked through the above site. I bet it is Blenders fault or the "Literally Hitlers" and I will have to get a dedicated topography whatsit. I don't want anymore thingies so will have another play.
Have a good weekend. I will despite my fun being marred by stupidity.

PROBLEMS.

I have bitten off more than I can chew let alone swallow. Blender is being a bugger, much worse than horses or TIG welders but not quite as bad as the taper turning attachment on the Colchester Triumph lathe. It has a mind of it's own, I clock it in parallel set the taper to within a thou a foot with a sine bar and it then decides to add a bit or take away a bit randomly, little bugger. The lathe is near perfect, it can turn a cylinder to within a fanny's hair over a foot. Can it taper turn, can it hell. Ended up having to offset the tailstock to get a couple of hours job done. Then I had to realign the bastard tailstock. What a bugger wish I had quoted job and finish and not a hundred quid. There again only school teachers and consultants get paid job and finish. Not to worry it keeps me amused and buys a bit of baccy.

I have several projects on the go in Blender. All are causing grief. A few weeks ago I swapped a broken EU flag for a proper Union Jack. It didn't look good as it fractured. I have spent several hours trying to get it better but though I have learnt stuff the end result is worse or much the same. I solve one problem and another appears. It could be that I haven't a clue what I'm doing. This 3D stuff is a challenge. 

Here is the video of my tribulations some self induced and others a surprise to me. I can't recall every having such problems in Photoshop but then PS is a dimension lacking.
I hear Mandelbrots now have a fourth dimension I can't believe it's true. If it is I don't have a ten percent chance, if they are using that funny cube then I'll call it a day. I can do a 2D one but the 3D confuse me and my machine. Such is life.

It's all good fun. I'll ask for a consultants job on Boris's new bridge. Bet it's good money and I'll be dead before it fails. Don't worry folk I'll run stress analysis through FreeCAD.

Have fun.

DANCING.

It's snowing again doesn't look as if it will come to much but the rest of today and tomorrow will tell.

Nasty wet stuff it is and falling in lumps.

I have been trying to make a cloth sym SkyDancer work for a week or two. Polished up this has the makings of a birthday video.

Now back to coding.
Enjoy your week.

I AM OLD.

I am old, in a few weeks I will be seventy.
 It has advantages as my hairdresser walked into her salon in a mini skirt and asked me what I thought of her legs. I considered them from this way and that, took my time and could find no fault. Wonderful they were. She then asked can you see hairs. I crouched down a bit but had to admit I couldn't.

She says.

"I meant poking through my winter tights not my Knickers you mucky bugger." 

I was only trying to be helpful.

It's fine here in Auchtermuchty but I bet she wouldn't have asked a fifty year old. Ageist she is, I told her I'll have the poliss on yer for being oldist. Quick as a flash she says and I'll have you for squinting up skirting and showing signs of perversion like scratching at your bits. 
Her husband races a Yam 1000R I did the engine mapping. Told her, those rev equators and slipper clutches for down shifts only appear automatic to an undiscriminating bloke that likes hairy legged totty..... After a Fuck Off I got a good hair cut and all for six quid from a hairy legged drop dead beautiful hairdresser.

I am thinking of using YouTube instead of Bogger as my hobbyhorse. I can well understand that I don't post on Blogger about trivia like a poofy son, a lesbian daughter or some such irrelevances. 
Yesterdays nonsense on the YouTube got seventeen views for a crap video in minutes. I get about forty replies here and most are tit for tat nonsense. Admittedly it stopped at seventeen but if I tell folk about Blender on YouTube at least some folk reply and some understand 3D and the mental gymnastics required to use it. Here is today's offering. It isn't easy but when folk will spend several thousand pounds on a digital camera and not have the wit or curiosity to explore the digital world or go back to analogue.Then it's time to my mind they gave up.

This is part one done in normal stuff. It takes ten minutes plus ten minutes for lighting and materials plus a few minutes for animation. I want to make Sorcar or the Russians blokes thing do it. It will be hard to make the following video in under ten hours. No be positive. I am getting good.

Using all the daft things and not being afraid I am slowly getting there. Where I get to is best left to conjecture.

Have a great week.

BUMPY MAPS.

I am still playing with the Sorcar add-on in Blender but as is my want got distracted by this free add-on. It's called GIS. It works but not very well, maybe I am not working it properly.
I am not feeling on top form, I suspect I will have to start foregoing the bat soup.

Here is a video showing it doing what it does.

If anyone is interested then I can do a HowTo. The result could be improved with practise but to be honest I can't think of anything sensible to do with it.
Enjoy your weekend.

REBARBATIVE.

Rebarbative is a little used adjective but a wonderful word. Jeremy Corbyn; Iran's, the IRA's. and Hamas's man in London as I think of him doesn't meet the criteria nor does the Greata Thunderbumtitless. Mildly annoying the pair of them and both will be destined for the cesspit of history.

 Rebarative folk are the snowflakes that think the police should shoot to maim. The police ought to go in and destroy his Imam and the sodding Mosque. I notice that since the election the police are coping much better. A double tap to the body to drop them and one in the head to make sure. Saves a fortune on legal costs and rehabilitation. 

 What really annoys me are folk far more intelligent than me who cause me sleepless nights by working out how to make computers sing and dance. I can see what they are doing but have endless bother making my machine do it. I have a similar problem with animals. Horses, sheep, cattle and even my own dogs seem to have an agenda at odds with mine. Rebarbative the lot of them.
I was a bit disruptive at school. They made a couple of us take Mensa tests, like a spot the odd one out sort of thing it was. The result was that I was quite bright but a pain in the arse and was bored to tears most of the time. They got me teaching Algebra to the year below or two years below. Great it was I fell in love with a dinky lass and I loved her for six months; easy peasy was teaching, my group got seventy percent pass rates in their O-levels. Then I had to give it up because the Oxford and Cambridge pure mathematics A-Level syllabus was doing my head in. Very difficult it was but not a patch on Blender and trying to recreate Mandelbrots without volumetrics, I don't think those were thought of then. Nor were they thinking of nubile fourteen year old young ladies and oral sex. I wish I had thought such things desirable and possible. Late developer I was.

I love this stuff and Blender being a free thing lets me play at no expense, that and a powerful laptop at quite a lot of shillings. I still use Adobe for picture editing but now I can work it I tend to use it for just that. I do use it for creating masks and gradients now and again but Blender can do that quite easily for free. It just takes longer and a bit more time learning it's foibles.
The following video is really odd. I tried and tried to get my head around the workflow in Houdini. I gave up after a month or two as though I liked the interface I just couldn't work it. Houdini is a non-destructive 3D programme that tends to or does start with primitives. That's computer programmer language for boxes, circles, tubes and spheres the latter and the former are derived from a flat plane. The buggers try to make it easy but make it harder. as you will see.
I downloaded a thing called Socar. It is in development so does crash but it is like the Tissue Add-On. It loads easily unlike some, I won't mention Animation Nodes; a real pain they can be. I doubt anyone here will want them but if you do just say and I'll tell you how to do it. I think Maya can do all this but I can't afford it and the lass from Cairns just used to import stuff into it anyway. Typical school teacher.

For anyone who has watched the above twice I thank you. It is very silly complecated stuff.

Never heard a socialist use rebarbative. A pound to a penny they will when they grow up and learn words longer than four letters.
Have fun.