I'm not entirely idle... This was the quick project that I thought would take 2 weeks but has actually taken all summer :-0  Next problem is how to light the little guys without the light being visible. 

I got the urge to do a bit more 3d printing.  This was sculpted in Blender and printed using a mulitjet fusion machine by Shapeways.  As you can probably see the surface texture is... not ideal for scale models although the material does seem to be durable (it's nylon balls glued together). 
One good thing with SLS and MJS is no supports are needed which makes print set up simple.  If I was going to print this using FDM I would break it into parts and align them for supports and to make cleanup and painting easier.  Shapeways likes single part models though.   

I tried filling the surface with plastic putty but it just peels off when sanded.  Thick acrylic paint worked better and sands surprisingly well.  Contour putty thinned with acetone would have been better although that smell. 

​I filled the googles with epoxy to smooth out the printlines, painted them and then added a clear of clear gloss. 

But honestly this doesn't look as good as old FDM printer even when it wasn't tuned that well. 
Now I just need to fight the urge to buy a new ender-2.  :-) 

I made a quick test video using Blender to study reflections for the purpose of painting toy soldiers.
It's all connected I swear.  I'm actually surprised there isn't already an app for doing this. 

This was the project I worked on in the first 2 months of UK lockdown.  I'd say it was 2 months full time work and lots of mistakes were made.   I've been away for most of the summer, it's been a crazy year, but now I'm looking back on it and looking to see what I could do better next time. 
I need to learn how to make outdoor environments, and I need to learn to to do retopo so I can have better facial animation. 

I accidentally got my 9 year old nephew hooked on some little blindbox action figure toys called SuperZings.  We worked together to design our own SuperZing.  He did the concept work and then I modeled, printed and painted the toy using Blender and my Ender3.

It was a fun little project and hopefully it inspires him to think creatively or something. 

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 :-)
​

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

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.