April 2017

29 years together - what made a good relationship

Today my wife and I celebrate 29 years of being a couple. Not married, mind you. That’s only been the last 19 years (as at 11 July). But we first started going out in 17 April 1988. To be honest, to this day I am still amazed that Nicole chose me. Twenty-three year old Greg was a bit of a mess. I was very much the geeky guy (I would

Fixed those few modelling challenges  #Blender

So yesterday at midnight I left you all having reached a point of frustration. Let’s have a look at a picture of the state of my model as exported from Blender and imported into DAZ Studio (my favourite place to render things)” So few textures and strange webs at the pointy end of my benchtop. Then one of you very kindly pointed out to me the obj export options. I

Small example of things not working in 3D modeling #Blender

Hi all, This is for those people out there who find Blender and DAZ Studio too difficult. This is for those of you who watch wonderful tutorials on YouTube, feel intimidated and say to yourself”Darn it, I’ll never be able to do that.” Yes, instead of showing some finished work of wonder, I thought I would share my struggles to show that a lot of what you see is not

Effective tutorials for Blender?

One of my good friends, Earthbalm, asked me whether I could recommend any effective tutorials for learning Blender. This is my reply. I’ve been trying to learn blender for years. I’ve watched hundreds and hundreds of tutorials. And yet here I am, still very much the noob, stumbling along as best as I can. Wait! Before you say something along the lines of “Come off it. Look at the x-ray

Started the C-arm modelling

I had intended to work next on the textures for the bench, but somehow found myself fiddling with the modelling. Anyway, here is tonight’s progress against the design..   As you can see, still a fair bit to go. I’m not happy with the beginnings of the x-ray tube part. Need to redo that. Yep – the more I look at the entire thing the more I can see things

Let the modelling begin: the patient bench

Hi folks, Well, the general designs have been made and I have a broad date set (30 June 2017). So the next thing to do is actually start work. I chose to start with the patient bench. There is an excellent reason to do this: basically, I was reasonably happy with my original patient bench and felt that it should be reasonably easy to refine it to my needs. And

X-ray model design - floor and ceiling mounts

Just a quickie post for design purposes in this Blender project. I’ve made very simple designs of the floor and ceiling mounts that these things have. As per the other designs, these are based upon images taken of actual machines that I have found on the internet. There does appear to be a bit of a difference. Here is the floor mount structure: You’ll note that it is very simple.

Rhiannon's holiday project is my garden shame

In 2008 my wife and I bought a little cottage on a large block of land in Sydney’s far south. We had dreams of a great garden in which our daughter Rhiannon could play to her heart’s content. We bought a wooden play centre with swings and a slippery dip. We bought a trampoline. But we neglected to consider a few facts about ourselves. The biggest of these was that

The bench design for the x-ray model

So here we have the final part of the model draft design that helps to understand just what I will be creating in Blender. To be honest, I probably did not need to break it down to four components. The middle two could probably have been combined, but just looking at them I felt them to be separate components. I think the design speaks for itself.   So the next

C-arm broad design for 3D x-ray model

Hi all, Below is a diagram where I have deconstructed the various photos and videos of X-Ray machine C-arms into their various components in preparation for my Blender build. Obviously there is a lot of guesswork involved, but it is all I need to go forward with this design. As you will see I have identified six discrete objects. I pondered a bit over the Image Intensifier and it’s interface