CLARIFICATION REQUIRED.

 It's been a bit breezy here and cold as well but we are fine. I lost the damaged hatch cover on Saturday night but have got it properly sorted now and last night it was perfect.

I popped into Cupar first thing for some very posh high temperature silicon seals. They have been on back order for ages, nothing to do with Brexit as I was talking to a friend in Florida and he is waiting ages for stuff as well. Whilst in the big town I called at Lidl, didn't buy much but got enough stuff to keep me going. 

I got a couple of tins of these as they go well in a stew or as I prefer to call it a casserole. One of my five a day! Christ on a bike if I managed five tins of beans in a day I'd be farting like a vegan or a horse.

I have a vegan casserole on the go.

It has the beans, onions, half a bulb of garlic, a big handful of those yellowy orange seeds, potatoes and cos it didn't look right one and a half pounds of best mince. I think the woke folk call it a flexitarian stew. Here we call it Tatties and Mince. This will see me through till Wednesday or possibly Thursday. Sorry about the focus on this but when I use shallow depth of field I must remember to focus on either the foreground or background. Just remembered the little yellow seeds are called lentils, very good for thickening a casserole they are if those about one don't mind you blowing off.

I tried vaping a few years ago and didn't get on with it. I am having another go.

I hope this time it works and I can limit rollups to high days and holidays and cigars to Christmas and Easter.

I've been studying the new Highway Code. It seems sensible by and large but cyclists ought to pay road tax and insurance if I'm expected to let them ride where they like. Pedestrians jay walking glued to a mobile phone or listening to stuff through ear buds, should be warned and if caught again have their legs chopped off. I am still working through it all but opening the door with my left big toe is going to take some practise. May have to get a Chauffer to do that job or get a left hand drive car. I can see problems here. Anyone recall The Green Cross Code, daft buggers had kids leaping in front of cars. They thought the Jolly Giant would save them. The same children now old believe in a jab or five. Terminally stupid they are. If I'd had three polio jags in a year and then got polio, maybe, just maybe I would think....wait a moment.

I was beginning to think that the populations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand had all turned into pooftas. The Canadian truckers and all their supporters have proved me wrong. Soy boy Justin Castro has gone into hiding and Ottawa is in party mode. It makes me wonder if he was christened Justin or happen it's a nickname his wife gave him.

Truckers Sir, a fringe minority Sir, most likely racists Sir.

That's Just In on the far left. Far right if one is not used to looking at images.

It's not all bad news. In fact things are looking up.

OXFAM missed a trick here, can't imagine any right minded bloke not paying three pounds a month to save her. Whether or not she can be arsed walking three miles a day for water would matter not a jot in Scotland. Perhaps Oxfam are still committed to shagging children. I understand they have promised to stop since they were told it's a bit naughty.

That's almost all from the loony bin. I'll leave with this.

Sad it's more of the same.

KEEP ON TRUCKING.

 

Just in case you missed this on MSM outlets. I'm sure they just haven't noticed it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAULINE.

 Happy Birthday Pauline. Here is a video card to celebrate.

This is the fall back video as I bit off more than my GPU could cope with. It was a combination of the bubbles, lack of grunt and my not having any new Arctic Paste for the cooler tubes and CPU patch. A bad workman always blames his tool. Have fun, it would be good to see the grown young ladies waving magpie scarer flags to help celebrate. I will never forget that, be good to watch them re-enact the idiocy.

Have a great day and let us hope for a few more.

EXR.

 I have been trying to learn compositing, I'm getting there but slowly. I needed a few letters with a glow on a transparent background. When I tried to render and save the animation as .PNG files it wouldn't have it. Blender supports .EXR files and they will support anything you fancy popping in them. I've never used them before as I believed the files to be a silly size.

Works a treat, if you look carefully the background is crosshatched which means there isn't one. That is the Alpha Channel.

Here is a screen grab of the Compositor.

I have yellow highlighted the important bits. In the composite node make sure use alpha is checked and that the node is plugged in. File format has dozens of options but Open EXR is the one, make sure RGBA is checked and for this image Colour depth (or 'Z') can be popped on Half Float as that gives 16bits, more than enough for this, it helps keep file sizes reasonable. The files are surprisingly small at 3MB about 30% more than a PNG file but a fraction of a camera RAW file.

Now it's siesta time.

DIRTY, DIRTY BOOTS.

 This morning after I'd finished with the horses I came back and read Cro's post. All about boot scrapers it is. He thinks you can get one for fifty quid, dream on. Cost one a hundred to get it grouted in. The NHS doesn't pay for itself you know, nor do our representatives and associated bureaucracy. (Burokasy must be the hardest word to spell). Working men are slaves in this country for 80% of their working lives. Possibly more if they like a smoke.

 I was feeling peckish and while I was waiting for Jacob to get my kebab and retrieve the betting slip I set to on the laptop and made one.

It's not bad for a welly cleaner and remover. It's not an original idea but I added a twist.

It's not automatic. You pop the heel of your boot in the semi-circular cut out and pull like buggery. I noticed some folk were thinking you needed a forked piece of wood. Not at all. This does it all.

There seemed to be some interest, were I to go ahead with production all would be made in the Kingdom of Fife out of the best Chinese or Indian metal available, no problems with smoke and other nasties on your doorstep. Quality control would be strictly enforced by means of nicey words, followed by a good smack from the boot scraper they'd fouled up. Quality is assured I can assure you.

It's fifty years since that treacherous Ted Heath signed us up to the EEC. Turned out well. Like hell it did we ought to have chased Germany for reparation. Instead the powers that be were wimps. What happened to the age old adage. To the victor goes the spoils? Load of slack arsed lefty fannies even back then. 

Have a good week.

LIGHT.

 

As you can tell this is an original bit of art by Adrian. I hope it depicts light at the end of a tunnel and not a bloody great lorry.

It looks as if Bumbling Boris has got things heading back towards normality. I could sense a change about a week ago with advisors and politicians starting to go into squeaky bum mode; hedging and fudging their comments. 

Boris is undoubtedly a disorganised chancer but the leftards really should know better than to poke him with pointed sticks. The boy appears to have done good.

The battle is far from over, the idle and fearful will not give up without a bit of a fight. I see Long Covid being dragged up but as I suspect it only affects state employees nobody but them will either notice or care overmuch. 

Here's a toast to hope.

HALF SORTED - I HOPE.

 I've had a few more hours playing with this text. I suspect this is about as good as the job will get. There's lot's more to animate but the materials or Shaders as Blender calls them are about as good as I can get them. I am having trouble rendering with a transparent background but I'll have a look at the instructions.

Here is a bit of video showing the animation so far.

Ignore the bit at the start with the bubbles jumping around, they are emitted as particles from a plane about in the middle and it takes them a while to get going properly. For the final animation I'll set them going 60 frames earlier at F-60 and then render from F1. The text needs further movement, I'll try keyframing scale and rotation for each letter. 

I have about a dozen test renders and I think this one or something similar will do.

The depth of field is a bit shallow but that is easily sorted. 

Looking at the above I think I may have been a bit optimistic but I'll give it a rest for a day or two and see if I can dream up a solution.

PS. Just realised that I should have popped a background in.

I blame the Chinkysniffles.

Not sure it improves things but I have been very trying.

BUBBLES.

 I wasted half of yesterday moping about, I am missing Alf something rotten even though I had seen the day coming for several weeks. I gave myself a kicking and got on with birthday stuff.

 It is birthday video season so I had a look for something bright, cheerful and animatable. I saw something I think is called Chromatype playing about. I looked for instructions on YouTube but only found a rather piss poor result by an interesting looking lass. I realised that with some practise I could, with a fair wind, do better. 

This morning after a quick visit to Sainsbury's and a more protracted call in at the stables I settled down to give it a really good seeing to. I love Blendering and it's just as well. This is really hard to get right so many adjustments and in typical Blender fashion they are either way too sensitive or do bugger all until you change the one above. Little wonder posh, bright folk write their own bits of script for repetitive jobs. Even a numb nut like me has taken to using a few characters of Python code to animate stuff. Blender being Open Source is excellent for this as you can re-code anything to suit yourself. I must confess it doesn't help me that much but it's nice to know one could were one able.

This is awful, it does have sparkly bits which I popped in using a compositor layer. The depth of field is too shallow but I can sort that bit. The little bubbles I will pop in using particles with no gravity and a Brownian motion. In the video the text expands and contracts along the mesh normals using a Wave Modifier and if I animate the letters then they will intermingle a bit and distort here and there. This is an EEVEE render it looks better rendered in a ray trace render engine and the new Cycles renderer doesn't take that much longer.

This is what it looks like rendered posh and what I would like it to look like I'll try rendering a frame of this and pop it into the compositor for some mist and sparkles. How to get the bubble colour refraction round the edges, I'll give it some thought, I've got a bit of time so maybe adding a touch of Fresnel and colour noise would help.

I've ten days till the next video so no worries.

I do have a tooth giving me serious gyp. It's days are numbered, time for some sailcloth twine and a painful five minutes tugging. Toothache is not nice, how does one tooth give you earache and eyebrow ache? Perhaps it doesn't for normal folk. I have all my bottom teeth but am fast running out of top ones and this s a top one. 

Have fun and enjoy your week.

BYE, BYE, ALFIE.

 

You were a grand chap. Thank you for the last twelve years, you were the very best of company.

IS THERE A CHANGE ON THE HORIZON?

 Though I admit it's been a good forty years since I voted I do love following politics. It's like a real time Soap Opera but far more expensive. One should get some amusement for ones money. Today I was sad watching Boris squirm but not sad enough to wish that the bastard was tarred and feathered. Queer Starmer should have left it to Angela to put the boot in. He's useless, a Blair protégé who was knighted for ignoring sexual deviants. Say what you like about Angela, she is still there and gobbing off like a goodun, not a Thatcher but he daren't sack her. Says all you need to know about Starmer. 

I had to laugh, it was all theatre. They always have rules for them and rules for us. Do you really believe that civil servants and politicians spouting about a deadly virus would gather to party if they were following or believed in the science or the virus. I struggle to believe it was a bring a bottle do. I fully expect we paid for the bottles. It was all bollocks to frighten folk into taking a vaccine that doesn't protect and doesn't prevent transmission so not a vaccine at all but it does make oodles of money. It can however cause lots of inconvenience. I know of one lassie who had her period for a month. I hear about fit sportsmen keeling over.

 Not to worry, you've been had. You should have kept banging pots and pans at the moon but you stopped as you felt a bit silly doing it. Surely it's about time you woke up to the reality that taking unauthorised drugs has risks. Many believe that smoking and drinking alcohol are bad as is sugar. It's mostly a tax scam.   

The draconian rules were designed to break your spirit. Wear a mask standing, or after ten in the evening. Men can go for a piss but have to wear a mask but ladies can relieve themselves maskless unless they are the mucky buggers that piss on the floor. Next is you smart meter folk will be allocated electric. It's all about control. 

Anyway it was a good day today, We got paid for the milling machine. I solved the wee problem of black dots on the bird. I was cleaning up strobe lights and a camera and 5x lens ready for insecting, It's a big job as I am sick of seeing the strobe reflection. I am building a new rig with modern daylight LEDs the strobes are now redundant.  Anyone want a load of strobes plus a very smart trigger for them. Whilst doing so I caught both sunrise and sunset.

Here are couple of snaps from the van.

Ages after dawn but not a bad view.

Red sky at night means it's going to be fine tomorrow. Unless it pisses down.

Have fun.

GREEN II

 This is a vast improvement and after much pondering only took a few clicks to sort. I was overcomplicating the job. 

This still isn't perfect as the little birds beak and eye are now semi transparent, some halfwit painted them green which the computer sees as 50% grey. Never mind I can live with that. The bird is bigger in this video as I scaled it so imperfections were more noticeable.

This is almost there. I imported the image sequence used in the black bitty effort then after trying a few nodes found that the Difference Key made a world of difference. It does the job better than any of the sliders available in the Keying Node on the previous post. I'll have to remember to pop the Difference Key in next time.

Thanks John, I was all for writing the job off but you inspired me to have another go.

This is what the original looked like zoomed in. This is actually the Matte but I find it easier to see what is going on in B&W.

That's that problem solved. 

GREEN.

 This post is not about the ecological nutters thinking they can influence climate. The disciples on the ground I regard as akin to King Canute and Don Quixote. (Spanish. The 'x' is pronounced as an 'h' except in northern Spain where it is said like a guttural softish 'k' a bit like the 'ch' in loch but a tad harder). The ones driving the agenda are unprincipled money grubbing bastards. They all seem to spend their cash on beachfront properties despite preaching rising sea levels or maybe falling sea levels, either way if they believed their nonsense I doubt they would spend millions on a property which will either drown them or leave them looking at miles of sand and rock.

This Green is about green screening, it's what the weather totty stand in front of, whilst they wave their arms about and tell us it's going to piss down harder tomorrow.

I have an idea for a couple of birthday videos. They will have semi transparent animated text on an animated background. I thought a little bird or insect flitting about would add interest. I pinched a couple of free video strips from PixaBay. The bird I have used for this is charming but crap, I suspect it was recorded at 60fps and dumped at 25fps. You will see little black dots following the bugger. Impossible to get rid off without either popping it through Handbrake or manually masking every frame and those days have long gone for me. 

You will see from the video that the little bird isn't on green but flits about on black. The screen can be any colour just as long as the subject doesn't have any bits the same. A Black weather totty could be very entertaining shot against a black screen. I'm surprised the BBC haven't given it a whirl.

The posh film compositors call see through the Alpha channel. You can blend the video layer in lots of ways but alpha over and alpha under would let the little bird pass behind the letter and fly back in front of it in the bit of video. This is what I want and it is going to be very time consuming. Easy frame by frame stuff but boring. I need an apprentice or a slave. I recall seeing a bank of nubile young ladies working away on an advertisement for Fusion editing software. Unfortunately I'm using Blender and as it is free nubile young ladies don't seem to be available. Round here they are noticeable by their absence so a half dozen would be impossible to source, must be lots in Melbourne Australia.  

This is the Blender compositor set up, I have done this stuff before but used Adobe. You can see the little bird I'm masking as I have popped a big highlight round it. There are lots of bits of things to adjust but the important, really important bit is to set up the Render instructions correctly I have put a yellow splodge on them in the panel on the right. File format has to be PNG and the colour channel has to be set to RGBA, it stands for red, green, blue and see through. Guess how I know?

There is not much Blender can't do but I have one major criticism the sliders are far too sensitive so I end up having to enter values. I will let them know and perhaps I could hold down something convenient like Shift and U whilst using my third hand to scroll and left click. Happen I'm just a bit clumsy. Not to worry it's free, useful in the right hands and provides hours of fun.

.

 

BAKING AGAIN.

 I could carry on with this baking malarkey but I think I'll call it a day. I will have to come up with some other ideas.

This was my first attempt which I showed a couple of days ago. I have made some positive improvements but I'm not happy and render times are getting silly.

This is the state of play so far, 

Sorry about the colour of the icing, I doubt anyone would want to eat that.

There is room for improvement and I could paint a mask to make bits of the bun case more transparent but that is more work for something that is rendering at around 6'/frame. The bun could be sculpted to give a more organic look. This applies to all elements, it's been a fun if fruitless exercise.

Not sure what the week has in store, Other than the usual Tom Foolery.

Have fun.

MASTER BAKER.

 As I mentioned it is birthday video season. I thought I'd try modelling a cup cake with a candle.

Here is version number one. The paper case is far too sharp but I suspect if I play with textures and use it in a video it will do the job. I also forgot the plastic candle holder, they are like a flower with a hole in one end and a spike on the other, no bother but time consuming. Should it become too much of a problem then I'll ban it to save the planet. The candle flame looks okay, I nicked it from Google images so it's only 2D but if the camera pans I can lock it to the camera. I can also make it flicker a bit. There's more to this 3D malarkey than I ever thought. The observant will see the candle light does percolate through the candle at the top. I used a sub surface colour for that and it's the first time. I have seen it but never knew what it was for. I looked it up and it does a proper job on candles. The flame isn't emitting light, I faked that with a point light. The reflection gives it away. I doubt many would have noticed.

That's about it for today. The new tyres are just brilliant, it's been snowy and very icy but I have superb grip, no slip slidey, end in a ditchy for me. The new Golf has a processor driven anti-skid which works far better than any I have used before, far superior to the Honda Civic I had and considering it's two wheel drive on a par with the posh Range Rover I used to drive. It's easy to forget it's winter. It's only the semi-skilled driving at five miles per hour that remind one the road surface may not be offering optimum grip.

As an aside, when we were young most of us had a knackered motorbike or the use of one. Learning to drive on a bike, I suspect, makes one far more aware of other road users and road conditions. Driving heavy goods or busses is the same one has to be constantly aware. We have two new cars in the glen and both were stuck yesterday. One a baby Kia and the other it's Nissan sister. Neither driver had thought to screw the towing eye in, amazingly, neither knew they had one or where it was or went. Why should free towers have to get cold hands popping tow eyes in? Jen pulled one out with her Quad, I got the other, it was in a ditch and so she ran me back to get a tractor. She made the bloke do his but I was so thrilled to be riding pillion behind Jen's behind on a quad I did the other one. They were both master bakers.

Have fun.

CONFUSED AS USUAL.

 It's birthday video season and try as I do I find it very hard to do good ones. Next year I may get there. Last year I learnt tons of stuff but being a thick bastard I keep forgetting what I learnt. I wish I had had a structured course in computer generated stuff, I suspect I'd have become bored and gone off on my own wandering path to mediocrity. Much like the teachers.

Here is a still from birthday card #1.

The sphere changes colour, pattern and disappears the happy birthday bit goes round and round but contra rotates to the sphere. Then the recipients name comes into view as the the sphere dissolves. To make things worse the lighting changes. How to keep track of that lot. The Dope Sheet, I knew it existed but never could fathom rhyme nor reason for it. It sorts out muddles for dopes.

 The little yellow rotated square diamondy things are Key Frames and can be selected and shuffled about to make a smoother or more appealing video. I suspect the posh sods at Disney knew this all along.

In other news, I hear Tony Blair is being Knighted. Sir Queer Starmer has the China Pox again, I suspect he is very close to an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. Not many folk can have caught a lethal disease as many times and survived. Not many folk would have survived protecting the peados in Telford and Jimmy Saville but it's a strange world we inhabit. Starmer is truly blessed and the Queen is a twat for Knighting them. Had she anything about her she'd have had their heads off while the chance was there.

I called at Lidl this morning on my way to talk to the horses and really scored. Two massive packs of stewing steak for £2.00p each, as many Tangerines or (Quick peels as they now describe them) as I wanted for a pound. Sweet ones were more expensive but these are fine. After checking out I got one of the best Veg Boxes ever, they are £1.50p and this box did three households after the thieving buggers at the stables had taken advantage of me. It had two packs of tiny lettuce, a mango and a couple of Kiwi fruit and some little apples that are great. Three bags of potatoes, one of baking, one of salad and some posh ones. It's like the second coming of Christmas. It also contained plums, a garlic bulb and a load of carrots, crafty sods pop the carrots underneath the good stuff. Some of the latter were the posh, small dumpy ones, the others were animal feed. We always have a surfeit of carrots at this time of year so I left the normal ones for the horses. Washed carrots don't last but the dirty ones are good for a few weeks. Lidl don't do dirty ones but the farms do and they do Brassica tops for nothing if one stops and asks when they have the machines running. I have enough veg left for a Veganuary and enough beef to make it worthwhile cooking and eating.  

Have fun.

USEFUL ADVICE.

 

I'm sure this is well meant but they should have added.

And Don't Refill Ink Cartridges When Pissed.

I think this one may be a spoof but who can be sure.

Have fun.