THIS COULD BE A GAME CHANGER.

 For a year or two I've been able to render animations in Blender quickly using the EEVEE render engine. The cycles engine used to take all night just for a few minutes of video and much longer if one wanted to eliminate things like fireflies. Okay one could turn off caustics and random sample the frame but it was still far from quick. EEVEE is not a ray trace engine and basically fakes everything but it does work in real time or near enough. I noticed there is an ADD-ON called SSGI (Screen Space Global Illumination).....Come on wake up at the back this is important.

This is a simple scene without SSGI rendered in EEVEE.

This is with and as you can see we now have fake reflected light. This scene is lit with a single spot. It's brilliant or almost, what I can't get it to handle well is if I light with and HDRI but that could well be me being silly or thick. Render times do not seem any longer so another step forward. A vast improvement which I used to fake by upping the reflective characteristics of materials and adding, coloured or not, point lights here there and everywhere.

This is the SSGI node tree.....I took one look and said wonderful, I like how he has coloured in his nodes. I must admit that I understand very little of it but I do like the fact that it is available to peruse........It's the beauty of open source stuff, nothing is hidden, in fact the opposite, one is encouraged to criticise and contribute. Not that input from me would improve things.

In other news I failed to get to Cupar and Lidl, I went to see the horses and called at the animal feed place for horse food and dog food. I did stop by Sainsbury's for tinned grapefruit so am well stocked up with both the pink stuff and normal. There is no appreciable difference in taste and the price is the same, I suspect they just drop some cochineal in the pale piss coloured vat after canning off enough of the the normal stuff. It adds a bit of variety to my fruit and Wheetbix which is not really Wheetbix but Aldi's or possibly Sainsbury's version thereof. You will be pleased to hear that I didn't bump into any working class folk. There was one lady in grubby white tracksuit bottoms, a fluorescent pink blouse and down at heal trainers but I spotted her and diverted down a different isle, she was possibly working class and one can't be too careful.

I will do Lidl first thing or be there for eight when they open. I have to get lots of heather or Ling plants as they are £1.60p as opposed to a fiver in the garden centre. I'll take a couple of trays full and that way one of the working class will load them for me. Little point in having an underclass and not using them. 

Tomorrow is going to be busy, the grain carters are coming and hopefully we can get the last of the barley ready for them. There are about thirty tonnes to combine, it's been dry since eight this morning and is forecast bright and sunny for tomorrow so all should be well. I see I have another job to do..........Some dilatory blighter has forgotten to close the cab door on an excavator. I'll have to get off my fat arse and shut it for him. I do hesitate to do so as only working class folk could manage to shut a digging machine door. There's a special lever for that job.

Not to worry. Have fun.