I got an e-bike!  I used to be a keen cyclist, but I'm lazy and unfit.  CV19 seemed like a great excuse to get back out on a bike, especially if a battery could take some of the slog out of it.  I knew I wanted a basic exploring/hybrid type bike rather than an mountain bike and I didn't want to spend a huge amount of money.  Then there were stock issues, many bike stores have pictures of machines on their websites that they don't have in stock.  I didn't want to order something and then wait 3 months...   
Halfords have a family of bikes that all use the same tech, you just need to pick the flavor you like, I went for their urban commuting model called the Subway, which is sort of a cross between a fixie and a hybrid touring bike in appearance.  You could also describe it as an old school mountain bike with bmx tires. 

It's powered by a Suntour HESC system.  That's a geared rear motor system which is street legal.  250W and pedal assist cuts about at 25kph (16mph).  It doesn't have a hand throttle, which means it also doesn't need to have e-bike specific brake levers.  The crank contains cadence and torque sensors which combined with some software result in natural feeling riding experience for the most part. 

So what's it like to ride?
Well it's a lot like riding a bike honestly, but with a couple of foibles you quickly adapt to.  The first foible is that there is a bit of lag between the crank moving and the motor starting.  I'd guess this is around half a second. Same thing with the motor stopping.  This is actually fine for hill starts, you just have to trust the motor is going to kick in as you reach the bottom of your pedal stroke.   Where this can bite you is turning the bike around.  If you aren't expecting it at low speeds, having the motor kick in while manoevering can be bit disconcerting.  It's something that you quickly adapt to.  The motor makes a hum/whine while its operating so you get a useful audio cue as well as feeling the power. The other issue is the speed limiter. It really does limit your speed.  16mph takes about half the effort that 17mph does, so if you wanted a fast bike, this probably isn't it, unless you have the lungs and legs for it.

Batteries
The bike uses a 36v 8.7Ah 313Wh battery and they claim a 60 mile range.  But that range probably involves a small rider who lives somewhere flat and likes to use Eco mode.  What I found was that my range is probably a bit less than half that.  I'm about 240lbs and Wales has hills. Still 30 miles is a good couple of hours pedalling so can't really complain.  Overall I feel that the balance between range and power is pretty good.  I mean if the motor had more power, then the batteries would drain faster.

I'm scared of punctures
The motor is in the rear wheel.  There isn't a quick release for the backwheel.  Removing the back wheel involves disconnecting some electrics and cutting some cable ties as well as the usual stuff. It's not something I want to try for the first time at the side of the road.  At some point when I'm feeling brave I'm going to change out the tires for some puncture proof ones and maybe I'll put slime in the inner tubes. 

I wasn't sure if it had enough gears
It has gone up every hill I've found so far.  Don't get me wrong, I still have to pedal and I'm still a mess at the top but it goes up 1:10 gradients that I would normally have to walk up.


Rest of the bike
I'd budgeted for a better bike, I was kind of expecting this thing to feel cheap which is part of the reason I didn't get a model with cheap suspension, but its actually very solid, the frame is crazy stiff, the welds and paint look top notch. The hydraulic disk brakes work well.  The rear mech is a bit chintzy but easy to upgrade.  I was half expecting it to feel like the cheapest bike possible with a motor thrown on it considering the price. 
The only changes I made so far was to change the ergonomic bar grips out for some round ones and to add an adjustable stem to raise the bars about an inch.  Apart from that its fine, even the saddle is alright.

​Summary
I love it. It feels like riding a bike, BUT WITH BIONIC LEGS. I would definitely like to try one with a more powerful mid drive motor when lockdown ends and the mountain bike parks and trials are open.  I'll probably rent a modern full suspension MTB and see how I like it.  Hey you never know, if I ride the one I have enough, I might even be fit by then. 

I was trying to keyframe a camera to follow an object by hand yesterday.  A combination of things including my misunderstadning of how keyframe easing made that a lot less fun than it needed to be. Lots of horrible interdependencies in my keyframes and jerky camera moves. There is a constraint that will allow the camera to track an object.  And you can easily check your easing in the graph editor.   Another great video from Grant Abbit:

For some reason I was thinking interpolation and easing were connected and I was treating it like black magic... then I watched this video that shows how to see the interpolation in the graph editor.  Duh! Why didn't I think of that...  :-) 

With these 2 videos I'm able to smoothly track an object flying through space from a stationary camera which is exactly what I wanted.  But for spaceships it probably makes sense to have the camera track an empty that the ship is attached to.  That way things like shake can be added to the ships coordinate system and will show up on camera.
This blog really is just notes for me on how to be less of an idiot :-)
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Another "my memory is so bad I have to make a blog post" entry.  This is a great little video showing how to use the graph editor for path animations.  So you can control the start and end of the path evaluation as well as the gradient of the curve.  

  The other thing I seem unable to remember is how to scale the graph editor axes independently which is very useful when doing find adjustments.  I know I've probably googled this 10 times. 
Ctrl+MMB and move the mouse up or down!!!!  Dumbass. 

I feel like I've been here before.  Vegas refusing to play Mov files.  OK Mov is an old format that Apple doesn't promote anymore.  But I have about 6Gb of alpha blended explosions and blood splats in that format.

To get it working:

• Make sure you have quicktime installed.  If not get it from Apple
• Then you need to enable quicktime in Vegas.  It's under Perferences->Deprecated Features 

Deprecated, my ass :-0

I've been using Eevee pretty much since 2.8 came out.  Turns out when I started using it, it made some assumptions that were wrong about how shaders needed to be set up.  Yesterday I finally got irritated enough to figure out why my renders always looked a bit off. 

I had 2 significant problems:

I was using DX normal maps when Blender uses OpenGL format. That's bad since they use different coordinate systems.

I was still feeding the Metallic and Roughness in using sRGB as the colour mode.  I found out that actually they should be set to nonColor, just like the Normal Map.

So now I have to go back through all the materials I created in this project and fix them.  Because I was lazy and didn't set this stuff up properly in the first place.  There might be a lesson there somewhere.... 

https://www.cgbookcase.com/textures/how-to-use-pbr-textures-in-blender

3 weeks with an Ender 3 Pro, printing model and miniature related content.  What did I learn?

Quality of the Prints
I tried the Ender with a .4 and a .2 nozzle.  The .2 nozzle and a small layer height will give the best quality. However even at the highest levels layer lines are still visible.  This basically means if you are making miniatures for display, it isn't good enough (in my opinion).  If you just want models for a game and don't care too much about quality then may be its OK.  Printing at high quality is very slow.

Another issue is glitches in the printer.  Obviously the Ender3 pro is very cheap and we are trying for very high quality prints, so any glitches or slips are a bad thing.  There are things you can do to minimize these like adding filters to the stepper motors, doing better calibration etc but there is a limit.  I had small amounts of slippage in x and z directions on most of my prints.  What this means is to get a perfect print you may have to print the model more than once. 
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The conclusion I came to was the extra quality provided by the finer nozzle wasn't worth the extra time involved in printing and that the printer is too slow.  

Default Quality =  2 hours
High Quality = 6 hours

Slicing
Before I got the printer I had done quite a bit of 3D printing using services like ShapeWays but I'd never had direct exposure to slicing.  Cura is a free slicer and seems popular with the miniatures community. It generates the gcode (Tool path) for the 3d printer. I had assumed that the slicer would just "rasterize" each slice but actually the fill pattern is quite complex, aiming for best quality whilst having a hollow component.  Cura is also where you add stuff like supports which are required to enable overhanging regions in the model.  You can also orient a model so that the supports don't obscure details on the face or front of the model.  
The biggest thing I learned about slicing was to trust the slicer.  You can move up and down the layers and play the tool path in the preview option after slicing.  Carefully checking the model Cura before printing saves hours of frustration with failed prints. 
I used the fat dragon games profiles for the printer, they are popular and work well.  Their models are also very nice if a bit simple, however they print without the use of supports and so are ideal for use with an FDM printer.  Definitely worth checking out. 

Finishing
Pla is actually pretty nice to work with with sandpaper, knifes, file etc and takes paint well, but because of the limits of FDM you are going to need to do a lot of it. This means it's probably best not to add a lot of tiny surface detail in the 3d model.  Use the printer to generate the gross shapes and then add surface details and texture the usual way with putty, etched brass etc.  Similarly design the prints for ease of clean up.  It's much easier to sand individual parts than a complete model in many cases.

What did I think of the Ender 3 Pro?
It didn't start well.  Somebody told me they burn houses down.  So a slow printer than can't be left unattended.  Mine was completely unaligned out of the box and took significant rebuilding.  The instructions are pretty much useless.  There are no exploded diagrams anywhere that I could find.  I had a magnetic bed, the plastic z-limit switch mount was designed for a glass bed which is thicker. So the z limit switch is in the wrong place.  Based on info on reddit, I cut the locating tab off mine and mounted it myself in the right place.  Oh and my print bad isn't flat which made bed leveling a challenge.

So if someone tells you putting an Ender together is like Ikea, they are talking nonsense.  It took me 2 afternoons to get mine together.

Pretty much anytime you do anything with the printer you are going to have to level the bed.  This is kind of a misnomer, what you are actually doing is making sure the bed is perpendicular to the print nozzle and is a good distance away from it.  The bed leveling springs as supplied are crap (get some thicker ones) and "the thickness of a sheet of paper" isn't very helpful since that distance depends on the nozzle size in play among other things.  Anway, bed leveling is a pain and takes about half an hour.  It definitely helps if the printer is in a brightly lit location.  It's hard to work on if you can't see.

I've run my printer for about 25 hours and I've had to tighten the x-axis belt tensioner.  I've also discovered that my y-axis wheels are too tight and are eating themselves against the drive rail.  
Changing filament isn't too hard.  Changing nozzle takes about half and hour, plus you'll want to level the bed after.

What I'm saying is that you can expect to spend an hour fiddling with the printer for every 6 hours it spends printing...  which isn't great.  It isn't terrible, but it isn't great either.

Summary
I would say this printer is good for roughing out parts. It's not really up to doing wargame miniatures at commercial quality levels, but for models or terrain as long as you don't expect perfect surface texture quality and are prepared to put in some work on the finished article it's not bad if a little frustrating to use sometimes.  Also as a prototyping machine to test prints before sending them out to Shapeways for higher quality printing its probably pretty good.  

I had 2 days left with the 3D printer.  I modeled up a little alien guy inspired by Babu Frik in the latest Star Wars, printed it on the Ender and then painted it.  The wet look on the eyes is 5 minute epoxy and his 'tash is golden retriever hair I found on the carpet. Thanks Abby. 
Still fighting with the fact that the printer is so slow and the quality isn't where it needs to be.  I tried filling the very obvious layer lines with a mix of acrylic filler and paint. It sort of works, but its a pain. 

I made a little RoJaws too. This was an experiment is parts breakdown.  It seems to me that smaller pieces are better than trying to print as a whole statue. 

Printed a Goblin from Fat Dragon Games using their custom profile for Cura and a .20 nozzle.  I've deliberately painted it to emphasize the layer lines.  At normal viewing distances of around a foot, the layer lines are not visible.  I'm pleased with the performance of the printer although it's very slow at this quality level. This print took around 5 hours.
Fat Dragon Games has some excellent set up videos, some printer profiles that seem to work well with the latest version of Cura and their models are fun looking and seem well designed for printing.
It's important to realize this model is 32mm tall, so the photo is much larger than real life.

Like colour makes difference to me? I'll be painting everything I make anyway.  My printer shipped with a small roll of white PLA.  It seems to work great, but because it's white and slightly translucent it can be a bit hard to see, so I bought a giant drum of red PLA instead.  It's slightly easier to evaluate the prints.
This does make me wonder though, why is PLA sold in such large rolls?  For the small things I plan to print a single large drum is a lifetime supply.  I would have rather bought a selection pack of different colours in shorter lengths.  My current print is going to use 2g of material and takes ~4 hours :-0