Adventures 'n Caffeine

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Cafe Fame Glasgow, sister was on a flying business trip to Glasgow, popped in here to have a coffee (and orange juice), yesterday but tablet was playing up. So a yummy americano and bruschetta were enjoyed. Place seemed kinda quiet but very nice and friendly, very chic décor, or at least I'd call it chic, with no understanding of what it is. Oh and this was yesterday :)

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This really annoyed me… It say’s “8Mt High Climbing Wall”, I KNOW I’M A PEDANT. BUT. there is an established convention for how to abbreviate METRES, it’s “m”, so it should say “8m High Climbing Wall”, it would have saved them money to have fewer letters printed…

So I quickly googled Mt as abbreviation, and most common usage (by most common usage I mean, usage I think is coolest) is for megatonne, which is a unit of EXPLOSIVE power. Disregarding the more obvious… Mountain.

In the real world: I literally just got offered a job :) Which I’ve accepted ^^

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So it was sunny today :) 

I wandered around and took a bundle of pictures, I was going to take my actual camera but didn’t want to lug around the extra weight, so... go Nexus go!

I tried to walk to the lighthouse in the distance but you can’actually get to it, you bump into a “Maritime Operations Centre” building, which is a bit of a shame, but since it’s windy as heck, it kind of makes sense since most people would be blown into the sea. I’m sure there’s other Health & Safety concerns.

Oh! I also saw a seagull smashing open an oyster by picking it up and dropping it. I knew that they did that in theory but since most Aberdonian seagulls live off mugging people of chips and pies, to see a more traditional seagull was rather pleasing, I didn’t hate it.

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So today I increased my weights by 1 kg each, not a lot but my shoulder was playing up when I used much heavier ones in the year. As a result I changed from strength to aerobic sets, which have been a lot better :) Oh I watch fairy tail whilst doing them :)

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Caffe Nero at Braemar (it might be Braeburn... Brae something) shopping centre. Nice Nero, always look like their about to close for the day though. We were meant to be driving to Largs for ice cream but girlfriend isn't so hot with directions. Its a Caramelatte and a White Chocolate Mocha, some kind of chorizo and mozzarella sandwich ^^

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The Suicide Squad picture that was released really annoys me...

BECAUSE it’s really bad. Now I don’t profess to be any good with photoshop, but a little work could’ve made a very lack lustre picture more interesting and that annoyed me. It feels like DC aren’t putting the effort in. Say what you like about Marvel, they make things look awesome. (I should point out that the Dark Knight stuff was amazing, so I’m specifically slamming this films handling).

Top picture is original, bottom two I’ve edited very slightly in photoshop, where I really DON’T know what I’m doing, I’ve never done picture manipulation or editing, but seriously, it looks better right? Right?

All rights are reserved by Warner Bros, I’m probably legally not allowed to alter these photos, so erm... oops.

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Peruvian coffee isn't usually my favourite so I'm kinda not giving Starbucks a chance...

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An alternative to the website I’m designing.

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What I’m working on just now, go Web Design go!

NB: Didn’t end up going to Starbucks, went to Valeries Cafe, no picture. Coffee was meant to be a flat white, was served a white coffee, disappointing but a lovely finish with the milk.

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So tiki cafe in the hospital makes one of the nicest black coffees I've ever had that I didn't make myself. Great job :) I'm here for moral support for my girlfriend who has an interview, I haven't injured myself or anything like that. 

Am also continuing with "The Girl Who Played With Fire" and the more I read it, the more I feel that Salander has been written like a video game character, the idea of a blank slate. Her ability to learn anything, her heavily subdued emotions, her infinite assets. Incredibly appealing, incredibly protagonist, incredibly underdeveloped as a character all making her very "playable". 

 Going to Starbucks later... I'll take a picture of the disgusting coffee they make ;) but seriously, its really bad coffee, stop drinking it (I'm only talking about an Americano, knock yourself out on some of their brewed coffee, unless its "Pike Place" which is horrendous).

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So it begins. Look. Coloured Blocks of Colour.

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So on my girlfriends advice, that’s the tyres adjusted to be less “tractor-like”... also she prefers red... ^^

Also adjusted the seat and some material effects.

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Look like a real motorbike now?

You can’t see it from the render shot, but I have actually updated the dials (now on both bikes) so that one is a rev counter and the other a speedometer. The metal is also much smoother and looks more like a real motorbike I believe. The rest of the dashboard, break handles, and sorting out that seat a bit more are needing to be done still though... was very tempted to add a road beneath these too.

Just looking at that photo, I think I might widen the mudguard at the front...

Okay so edited the front of the bottom bike entirely as you may or may not be able to see from the bottom picture. Look! You can see the screws :)

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So that’s the handlebars added, also restored the bike colour to blue, simply because I’ve saved it as “motorbike blue” so having it green was mildly frustrating me.

To make the bars started out with a cylinder and extended it, vertice edited it, scaled it and plonked it on to the front sprongs of the bike. As you can see from the 4th photo, I decided that this didn’t look quite right so isolated those elements, scaled the sprongs down, made some new extensions to them and scaled extensions inward. This created a nicer curve to the front bars which I felt was more authentic.

Made the grips in the same way that I made the tyre treads. It was actually more difficult than I’d like, mainly because it’s something I should have done first not last. The reason for this is that I’d already massively messed with their orientation, which meant that my x y and z axis for orientations were useless, resulting in a lot of frustrating moving through 3D space to get the grips aligned. Currently they are using the same colours as the tyres which I think looks right. Apart from the rest of the engine being missing, starting to look a great deal like a motorbike.

Also had this Blender Cookie youtube video running in the background. After the bike is complete, it’ll be a case of constructing an environment for it to be in. So need to start looking in to that.

Environment Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af6A1uvNhyM

Blender Cookie Youtube Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9VayT7q3pQ7tdF-TG4Q0yQ

Going to stop for lunch now and then I need to take more books to recycle. I’ve still got two bikes, I just moved one to another scene (which is something I learnt to do today, very easy to do, should’ve been using it more). Don’t want to put the speedometer on to the bars until the bars have a dashboard for it.

Just noticed that the rubber grips are actually incorrectly seated on the steel bars so am going to quickly adjust that... Done. Also just found out how to correctly group objects in the outliner window.

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So today I made a speedometer, was about 2 hours work, good times :)

Though this appears very simple, one of the main issues I found with making this was the difficulty on getting things to construct along a bezier curve. I also spent quite some time trying to get numbers and lines to match up using bezier curves. Couldn’t get it to work, ended up have to do it by hand. This is no doubt due my own misunderstandings rather than anything else.

Used,

http://blendermesh.dasya.com/creating-a-fancy-watch-in-blender

as a guideline to help me, though Jahnu Best is definitely more skilled than I. I also don’t like to follow guides that are so step by step, simply because I don’t learn anything new.

Something I did learn is that one of the issues I’m having with the metal material is due to my setting the emit factors way too high. The metal is essentially lighting itself rather than reacting to outside sources of light. I also had a bit of a play around and think I found out how textures work with materials, but haven’t tested it yet.

For the sake of completeness I used this speedometer to judge drawing off

Was interesting to work with text as I’ve not done so before but still found that orientations in 3D space are a nightmare. This is probably due to my own failure to correctly set my views or select the correct axis of orientation but still, fiddily. Annoyingly I found out that they adjust on the bezier as you scale, meaning that I can’t scale them down, as a result the two speedometers on the black bike have no numbers (I will change one to a rev counter but that’s for another day).

Oh yes, Blender decided to duplicate everything, I have no idea why, there’s probably some shortcut key I hit by accident, but if not, then that’s annoying. On the plus it means I can arrange the bikes so that there’s one facing each way.

Got stuck in to this so wasn’t actually listening to anything, I’m now listening to Panic at the Disco. Dinnertime.

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So the big caffe Nero in Aberdeen.. It just feels more impersonal than the others. Bigger has equated to less cosy. Furniture is a pleasant mish mash, staff seem drained. Oh yeah reading the next millennium series book ^^…

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So that’s todays work, top 3 pictures rendered, middle picture 3D view and bottom a lovely wireframe because frankly, why not. Going to do a stage by stage picture sequence tomorrow, which will focus on handlebars and display dials.

Actually took a lot of work to get the bike looking from how it did in my previous post to this one.

The entire chassis needed taking apart and adjusted, this was  because the seat didn’t actually have enough space to fit on the chassis because the chassis itself was too wide. No point building a virtual bike unless a virtual person can sit on it right?

Also had to make a great deal of adjustments to the front of the bike, this was because there was no sensible way to attach the mudguard to the rest of the bike, and whilst a virtual environment is more than happy to have things floating in real air, I feel it shows a lack of commitment to what I’m doing to not connect things properly. As it happens, there are screws *inside* bits of the body where I felt it added to the building process. This is mainly because I’m incredibly proud of my screws and want to use them wherever I can.

I’ve generally just been showing completed work which doesn’t really get across how much work goes in to building things, I think the wireframe gives you an idea but I feel I’d love to do a every 10 minutes snapshot over say 2 hours, so will give that a try tomorrow.

I need to do some research in to materials properties as I’m mainly just typing in random numbers and learning by a very hit and miss process. There’s a host of great youtube videos out there so I will shout out to a few I find benefical tomorrow. I may also go out to get a coffee to break up the excessive amount of 3D modelling appearing on here.