I designed a Facebook ad and it wasn’t that hard!
Anyone who has followed me on Twitter knows that my sister-in-law Kylie is very clever and has written an App for Apple phones that lets users create check lists for all sorts of projects from moving house, organising a party and so on.
Painting interuptus – Almost not finishing The Three Sisters
February 2013. I had finished the portrait of my daughter Rhiannon a few months earlier and I still felt upset that it had not met my expectations. I did not want to touch a brush again. Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by Richard, an old school friend who now resided in Japan....
2012 – The time I painted a portrait of my daughter
Tracking through some old Facebook posts I stumbled across a 2012 series in which I described the painting a portrait of my daughter Rhiannon. At the time I whined about how my Keratoconus impacted my ability to see properly. I guess it was the year before I had to have an operation on left eye...
Old photographs, Machine Learning and DeOldify
In my day job I am a database programmer. I love data. The reason I love data is twofold. Firstly, within data there resides stories and I adore stories. Secondly, data offers a challenge in its presentation. How do you present data in a manner that is not only meaningful but also engages and inspires?...
Two achievements – a short story and a computer graphic – yippee!
My health has been a little dodgy recently and, with a minor hospital procedure this week, I cannot say that I had been in a good mood. However with every cloud there comes a silver lining – and I got two! The first was that the magazine Midnight Echo bought one of my short horror...
Time in this 3D hair journey for 3 Rs – Research, Review, Reflection
A long time ago I was a teacher. Besides the normal three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic), I always followed with a second three –
Making a simple hair transparent texture #Photoshop #GIMP #Paint.NET
Hi folks, This post will be very similar to my post about making an opacity map. So if you have read that post then you only need to skim this for salient differences. Just to make it slightly different I have also added an incredibly small flaw into the hair by way of a slight...
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...
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...
Making a simple hair opacity map #Photoshop #GIMP #Paint.NET
Purpose In the first post of this series, I made a simple hair texture, demonstrating how similar hair textures can be created in Photoshop, GIMP and Paint.NET. In this post, I shall show how to make a simple hair opacity map using these three applications. It’s remarkably similar. NOTE: In this tutorial, I do