The Blog-thing

The latest edition of Blender For Dummies has officially been released…

I’ve been carving a lot more, both with the bent wood rings that I make, but also in general. For carving the rings, though, I need a stable mount to do that detailed carving work. Engravers have something like this, but they’re expensive and quite overkill for my needs. So I went about designing and 3D printing my own…

A few folks have suggested make the “It’s Vertex Not Vertice” shirt available for sale. To that I say… OK!

I’ve gotten a bit of feedback on the previous two parts in this series. One of the things that’s been brought up is just how much of a “rabbit hole” various social media platforms can be. It’s to unwittingly get sucked down into it. Hours pass while you’re scrolling through posts and you suddenly wonder where all that time went. You’ve got work to do, so you want to avoid letting that happen…

Yup. Facebook is just about ubiquitous now. It almost doesn’t even matter what thing it is that you do. Whether you’re looking to find an audience or build one, if you want to be in front of eyeballs, Facebook is a critically (and, on some level, disappointingly) big piece of that puzzle. Just about everyone and their mother has a Facebook account these days… often to the embarrassment of both those people and their mothers. As a person interested in gaining exposure for your creative work and skills, I’d advise that you be on Facebook, too. It is, after all, where the people are…

You’re doing creative work and you’re interested in actually making a buck or two off of it. It could be that you’re looking to make enough to actually afford a cup of coffee at that little cafe you’re at all the time. Or maybe you’re really ambitious and you’re aiming to make enough to buy a new house. Whatever your goal, the result is going to be zero unless you get your work in front of some eyeballs. This is true whether you’re selling your own original works or just showing off a portfolio so you’ll get hired for commissions. You need to go where the people are. People are on social media…

So I’ve found myself another fun and interesting distraction. Bent wood rings…

So here’s the premise: For scenes that take around a minute or less to render, performance is actually worse if you render on all of the cards with a single instance of Blender. This is because (AFAIK) there’s a bit of additional time necessary to collect the render results from each card and stitch them together. That time is a fixed short duration, so it’s negligible on larger/longer render jobs. However, on shorter render jobs, the ‘stitch time’ has a much more significant impact…

When doing my work, sometimes I need to get information out of a .blend file. For example, I sometimes need to do batch image processing (renaming, file conversion, etc.) on my rendered output. There’s not a nice way to just query the .blend file for that information. Sure, there’s BAM and even the old blenderaid tools, but they’re a bit heavy-handed if you don’t have them installed. So here’s the hacky solution I’m currently using…

I got myself good and distracted from my regular project work and ended up writing the start of a little script that I’m calling JungleBook. It’s makes images that are pretty and interesting… and might just provide a little bit analytical benefit.