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 

Found myself in a situation where I needed a project for about a month so I picked up an Ender 3 Pro to have a play.  I've seen some very impressive prints from these basic FDM printers, but I've also seen some terrible prints too....

I'm an idiot, don't listen to me.  Apparently these things are as easy to build as IKEA. I found it a bit of a pain to put together.
Where are the instructions?
There are some instructions in the box, but most are on the micro sd card. There are also some test print files. However the test print models are pretty big, you might want to find something smaller to start with.
Get the base flat:
Take the base out of the box (the big bit shaped like an H) on a flat surface and check that all four feet are touching and that it doesn't rock. If it does, it's not aligned.  You'll need to slacken off the bolts holding it together and get it straight.
Get the uprights parallel:
The next step would have you attach the 2 vertical extrusions to the base.  However all the holes are slightly over sized so you can make life easy on yourself by attaching the top piece to the verticals on a flat surface to make a U shaped component. That way you know the verticals are pretty well aligned with each other.  Attach them to the base, and then remove the top bar to finish assembly.
Adjust build plate:
The build plate moves back and forth on the y axis ( z is up and x is left to right).  The plate runs on 4 wheels on the extrusion.  If its wobbly, tighten the eccentric nut with the included wrench until it moves smoothly without wobbling.
Check for alignment:
With the printer assembled but powered off, it should be possible to smoothly move the parts along all 3 axes.  Z will be tighter because of the worm drive, but the worm drive shouldn't be bent or under load.  If the print head carriage is binding, your printer is bent.  Undo the bolts and straighten it out.  This is why I suggest starting with a known good flat base and getting the verticals perpendicular.
Limit Switch:
The original Ender came with a glass bed.  The pro comes with a magnetic bed.  The glass is much thicker than the mag bed which means the Z limit switch isn't in the right place.  It's keyed to the frame with a little plastic tag.  Reddit said cut it off so I did, then with the bed springs crushed down more than 50% I guesstimated a good spot for it.  While we are talking about bed springs, the stock ones are a little weak, get some stiffer ones.  They are an easy and cheap upgrade.
Plug:
My unit came with the correct voltage PSU and English instructions but a French plug so go figure. Also since one of these machines once caught fire, I got a smoke alarm that lives by the printer

Summary:
Assembling this thing was not at all straightforward or foolproof. Bring patience and your A game. It doesn't help that the entire unit is made out of black materials.  If would be much easier to see what was going on if it were made in a lighter colour. It took me 2 afternoons to assemble because of the alignment issues. 
​
Enough moaning, once I got it together it works fine :-)

It's important to finish things.  If you abandon every project you start because it doesn't meet your idea of perfection you never learn the process of getting to the end. All projects go through an ugly stage, you just have to have the faith in yourself to push through, and that only comes from experience.

Fake News (Alien Edition) was inspired by the aliens in District 9 and some paintings by Chris Foss that featured Easter Island heads.  I was hoping for a more "realistic" style but what I've ended up with looks a bit like Antz.  Next project, one of the major goals will be to go for something more photo-realistic.  That's been something I've been working on all year.  Where to add detail, how to texture etc.  Seems like this is something you just have to learn by doing, no short cuts... 
I'm estimating that I have around 20..30 hours in this project, but it was spread over a couple of week.  That means as I get better something like this should only take 2 or 3 days. 

I've used Blender's sculpting tools a few times with limited success.  This time I decided to sit down and watch some training videos rather than just guessing how to do stuff.
Found this series of videos by Grant Abbitt and I think they are pretty good.  The use of constant detail, refining the shape and then cranking the detail up seems to be very logical and perhaps not what I was doing before.  Also |Grant does a good job of showing you the finished product at the start of the video and his videos are clean and concise.  Videos where you don't see the results until the end are a peeve of mine.

​Time to make an Easter Island Head.

I'm currently working on an Alien outside new broadcast... Inspired by District 9 and Chris Foss's Easter Island head spaceship paintings.  Here's an early shot processed to look like a Victorian photo.  One of the important things here is even though the ships and head will be small on screen in the final product, I need to make them appear to be the same scale.  If you imagine the ships to be about the size of a 737, then the head is huge, so I'll have to pay attention to that when adding the materials.   This head looks like its about 4 inches tall. 

This is a pretty exciting week for Blender users with 2.81 dropping.  As well as a host of new features it offers improved performance when rendering.  I decided to take a look, since performance influences which renderer to use.  In my case, I love the look of cycles but I'm just too impatient.
Using a scene from a project I just finished I decided to compare 2.8 with 2.81 as well as with the latest Studio Ready driver from NVIDIA.

Summary: 
For my limited test scene on my specific computer: 

• 2.81 halved my render time using Eevee.  >54% gain.
• 2.81 cycles with OptiX decreased my render time by a quarter. >25% gain.

Win!

Note: I didn't compare the output images except visually. They look about right, I don't know how different the pixels are, it isn't something I'm that concerned about.  If you need to match footage between versions that might be something you care about. 

Your mileage is going to vary! My scene probably has all kinds of weird stuff in it and for my cycles renders, there is still a lot of noise.  That's partly because I did the project using Eevee so I didn't care about the lighting for Cycles.  The Eevee and Cycles renders look totally different.
My system is an off the shelf HP Omen desktop running Win10 .

• i7 9700F
• 16GB
• RTX 2060

Eevee Performance
Switching from 2.8 to 2.81 gained me a significant performance increase. 
This increase did not change with the new OptiX driver. 

Blender Eevee Time to Render Per Frame for 24 Frames

• 2.8   = 2.6 Seconds
• 2.81 = 1.2 Seconds

Pretty nice lift right?  Basically my Eevee renders now take less than half the time.

Cycles Performance
Blender Cycles Time to Render a Single Frame

• 2.8 = 90 Seconds
• 2.81 =  262 Seconds  <-- this is bad and wrong and I'm a doofuss.

Wait? What? Dur.  Important point here.  You need to go into:
Edit->Preferences-> Cycles Render Devices
and set your preferred rendering system. If you have it set to none which is the default, its going to render on the CPU which will be slow.  

Cycles Performance Take 2
By the time I realized the mistake above I'd already installed the latest Studio Ready driver from NVIDIA using GeForce Experience.  I wasn't willing to roll back drivers to test this but I did do render tests on the latest driver with 2.81 with None, CUDA and Optix.

Blender Cycles Time to Render a Single Frame

• 2.8 (Cuda?) = 90 Seconds
• 2.81 (None) = 262 Seconds  <- This implies previous test on old driver wasn't using GPU.
• 2.81 (Cuda) = 89 Seconds
• 2.81 (Optix) =68 Seconds

The interesting result here is 2.81 using Optix. I'm seeing about a 25% reduction in render time which again is definitely worth having.

Disclaimer: 
I used to work at NVIDIA :-)

Finished this one off. Definitely learned a lot this time around. 

Seeing as I wasted an entire day on this....   
I was building a tiled road section with nornal maps, when I rotated tiles I started to see some weirdness in the specular.  Took me a while to figure out what the issue was.
The input to a normal map vector should have a Color space of Non Color.  That's probably true for all normals maps wired up this way :-0  Doh! Doh! Doh!

In the past a lot of my cg work has been 2.5D at best and I've added camera shake in post.  But since upgrading to the latest version of Vegas I've lost my favorite camera shake plug in.
Previously I would have been warey of adding camera shake in Blender since rendering a 5 second clip could easily take 5 hours but with eevvee (the very fast OpenGL Renderer in Blender 2.8) I can generate 1080p 24fps video frames of my current scene in almost real time. This means that taking risks in the animation is much less expensive compared to using Cycles (the ray tracer).
Here's a youtube from an annoyingly young person showing how to add noise to a camera in the graph editor.  Obviously this noise could be added to anything, not just cameras.  Also obviously this doesn't mean I won't continue to add camera shake in post, it's just another tool in the bag. 

Getting ready to call this done... this took about 3 weeks.  Blender and Substance Painter mainly.  This is supposed to be an off-world mining colony in the style of Bladrunner/Alien.   I need to add a bit more detail to the terrain, but that can wait until my new computer arrives. 

Nice video here on how to achieve this: