2018

Sorry, won't be writing many articles on my blog for a month or so

Hi all, (this is a bit of a feeling-sorry-for-myself post) Some of you may have noticed my absence recently. Some of this has to do with work obligations and some with the rapid decline of a family member. As any regular readers will know I secured myself a job in November following two years of unemployment. I’m enjoying it thoroughly. The downside is that it takes me 95 minutes to

Our first day in #Rome

This 2015 trip was our second visit to Rome. Our first had been in 2002 with Globus. Back then we had stayed in a hotel not far from the Colosseum. The room had been small and the hotel staff arrogant. We wondered how our Trafalgar Costsaver experience would differ. The question was quickly answered when we reached our hotel, the Ergife Palace Hotel, at around 4 pm. It was spectacular.

Test rendering a transparent hair texture in #Blender

In my last post (about an hour ago), I commented that while occlusion maps were good, I wondered what the hair would be like if I used a texture that already had transparency. So I quickly cobbled one together in Photoshop that was based on the same two textures that I used in the last post. Here is the node set-up that I used in Blender: Note that it is

Last night I sang

Last night one of my local churches ran an Open Mic Night. For those not in the know, it means an evening where anyone can turn up and perform. Karaoke was available for non-musicians, or else we were expected to bring our own instruments. I chose the karaoke machine. The turn out was not large, but at least one professional musician/singer was there. He was a keyboard player/singer who performs

Test rendering the hair opacity map in #Blender

Hi folks, the purpose of today’s post is to document my testing of the hair opacity map that I created in my last post. I am doing so in Blender cycles and I will be assigning the hair texture and the opacity map to a bezier curve. Huh! A Bezier curve! Yep. At the end of my post, I shall place a link to a great Youtube tutorial called “How