I have this friend at work, I’ll call him John. Unless I called him Mike you can’t get any more generic than that except my name is Mike so it could get confusing.

John has spent the last six months car pooling with his wife, taking turns with his wife taking his kids to school (college mind you) driving him crazy because his hours are then all over the place. He gets in at eight one morning and maybe 10 the next etc.. He finally was able to have her car fixed when he then broke the axle on his car, back to carpooling. Step back a year and a half, before I met him he had the doors stolen from his car, a jeep with soft top and in the end cost him in excess of 5,000.00 to purchase new ones, stripped, mechanical put in and then painted. During this time he spent a few weeks driving to and from work without doors in the winter. Winter is cold in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Fast forward to present when both he and his wife have their cars and last month he has his doors stolen again.

They are still gone.

Tuesday his wife goes in for surgery on her back to have some vertebrae fused and thankfully his daughters are flying in from Las Vegas to help him take care of her.

At 2:50 yesterday morning he sent a message (text) to us and let us know he was not feeling well and that he may not be in. At 9:00 his wife called our manager letting him know John was in the hospital. She had found him on the bathroom floor unconscious and bleeding from the mouth and ears. His jaw was broken in three places, broke three teeth and has a broken wrist or hand (we aren’t sure about that). His jaw will be wired then banded for six weeks, need to see a dental surgeon soon and sometime during this Labor Day weekend have the bones in his hand/wrist set and possibly pinned in place.

I will never complain about what I may consider bad luck again.

Goal starting tomorrow, set a reoccurring meeting notice for myself reminding me to remove my USB from the computer and put the dang thing in my pocket. Time for the notice to flash on my screen 3:30, one half hour before I leave for home. I hope this helps 🙂

Here is the almost complete Modern House with just a few finishing touches that I will do after work tomorrow. Tonight I started on another module from the Architecture Academy. I tried to take care of those little things this morning at  work but their computers are just not up to loading a file of that size. When I tried to load and work this morning Blender would start to load the file and just quit.

It is a bad few days when your WiFi goes out, your phone dies and your charger decides to kick the bucket all at the same time. To top it all off I could not get a new charger until today. The problem with the iPhone 5 would be the new charging connector they have. I have multiple micro USB chargers around the place here and only one for the iPhone 5. Finally a trip to Best Buy and 42.00 later I have a new charger cable plus I bought a micro USB to Lightning adapter. The adapter is .5″ x .375″, very easy to loose and at 20.00 I had better not. Enough of that, it is nice to have my phone on charge now and the WiFi back. On to creating scenes in Blender.

I had been noticing objects missing when I would open a file I had just worked with the day before and at times I would find duplicate objects here and there. Something was going on and I wasn’t sure exactly what it may be. Add to that my files size was increasing by a large percentage so I decided to do some investigating.

What happens when you create a scene with the various options: Full Copy, Link Object Data and Link Object?

Full Copy: Largest change in file size.

1. Materials Duplicated with .001 added to material name.
2. Layers Copied and Layer Names are maintained if using the Layer Manager Addon*
3. Object Edits (Mesh): Not Replicated Between Scenes
4. Object Rotation Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes
5. Object Location Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes
6. Object Scale Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes
7. Object Layer Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes
8. Object Material Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes

Link Object Data: Second place in change in file size.

1. Materials Not Duplicated
2. Layers Copied and Layer Names are maintained if using the Layer Manager Addon*
3. Object Edits (Mesh): Replicated Between Scenes
4. Object Rotation Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes
5. Object Location Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes
6. Object Scale Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes
7. Object Layer Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes
8. Object Material Change: Replicated Between Scenes

Link Object: Smallest change in file size.

1. Materials Not Duplicated
2. Layers Copied and Layer Names are maintained if using the Layer Manager Addon*
3. Object Edits (Mesh): Replicated Between Scenes
4. Object Rotation Change: Replicated Between Scenes
5. Object Location Change: Replicated Between Scenes
6. Object Scale Change: Replicated Between Scenes
7. Object Layer Change: Not Replicated Between Scenes
8. Object Material Change: Replicated Between Scenes

*If you are using the layer management addon, any layer names you created prior to creating your new scene will transfer to the new scene. Changing layer names within different scenes as no affect on other scenes as well.

Knowing exactly what is happening when you create new scenes within your model is very important to know. What you do with your object within your scenes and what affect it has on any other scenes you have created is another one of those pieces of information you need to find for yourself when using Blender. What information is carried over to the new scene as it is created with the different options (layer location, objects xyz position, material etc.)? I will be doing some experimenting tomorrow morning, organize this information and report back then.

See ya then.

I downloaded the new Version Control using Mercurial video from CGcookie, watched most of this in the morning and was so thankful for this information from Sebastian Koenig. As he talked about at the beginning of the video regarding creating new versions of all your .blend files as I do, showing me how messy and confusing it can be or rather ‘reminding me’ of this I find this solution so nice. I will be trying ti out this evening or just installing depending on the time I have after watching the rest of the video when he talks about Dropbox of which I am a great fan.

I have also been trying to slim down the size of my .blend files. As I was working last night I had noticed items showing up in different layers, disappearing, duplicating etc. and was kind of stumped. So this afternoon I also opened up an earlier version of my .blend file for the modern home which was 1.3gig presently and removed all scenes except for the default ‘scene’ scene. I then revised my ground plane again by removing unneeded faces (more than half) and then dropped the particle count, saved and the file size dropped to ~700K, much better. Right now I am going to try a render of the whole scene and check the time and tomorrow I will work on a more practical approach to handling scenes with out jumping my file size so drastically. I think I was creating the new scenes incorrectly but we will see.

On to the rest of Sebastian’s video and the render.

P.S. I received an unexpected raise at work today 🙂

Now I am just have fun tweaking some of the objects within the model right now. The grass plane is too big, extending places where it does not need to be making it difficult to composite the image and as I said before the file is quite large. Last night I settled on limiting the passes that were rendered and then upping the particle count of the grass to 350,000. This may seem a little on the extreme but it actually came out quite nice. Now that I know what the setting need to be on the grass I will add the leaves, clover and a sprinkling of flowers. So, the final render of the grass, home and foliage will be done tomorrow night and then I can finish the compositing. Compositing is an aspect of CG I really enjoy and one of my favorite aspects of Blender.

P.S.Even though I changed the size of the plane used by the particle system for the grass, changing the emission amount won’t make that much of a difference because I did not have all of the vertices of that plane weight painted enough to make a difference. I need to get that plan out of the way for rendering and compositing.

I have been working on finishing up the Modern House from the Architecture Academy and have created a monster of a file. At this time I am rendering out different scenes, at various sample sizes to create a composite I can live with. The longest renders, surprise surprise are with the grass particles and the CPU. Once that is complete and I am hoping I have enough particles in there so I will not have to render again. I will then composite all the renders together. I am crossing my fingers I can finish soon because this is taking quite a long time.

Yes I do have a real job and it is taking its toll so I had to take a couple days off and actually work. I had to clear the head for other reasons as well and to make a long story short people outside our organization are driving me nuts. In a nutshell there are other managers within the plant wanting myself and another Engineer to be onsite last weekend ‘just in case’ we are needed. Thank the lord my direct super saw things my way and all I had to do was sit on the computer at home and ‘monitor’ the activity. A complete waste of a Saturday and a Sunday as NOTHING happened.

On to other topics. I have been working within the Architecture Academy, Blender Cookie’s Character Modeling (I need to get my Wacom 12″ Tablet set up properly for sculpting), playing with multiple tools and today watched the ‘2d Tracking and Compositing’ videos. Not that I have a real need to learn this, it just looks like a lot of fun to play with. I’m thinking, right now of bringing in my Flip UltraHD video camera into work in the morning, taking some videos and seeing what kind of crazy stuff I can come up with 🙂

I have just few finishing touches to put on the Modern House for The Architecture Academy and I’ll post that render tomorrow. One thing I had to address is a driveway. In final image of the Module, the gardens are done, including the lawn however the lawn extends out in front of the garage. Well everywhere I have ever lived, from a couple Alabama double wide trailers to some quite nice ‘Street of Dream’ style houses, never have I had to drive over my lawn to enter the garage so a minor change is required there.

Have a great evening and see y’all tomorrow

Quick first render of the Modern House

Very quick and dirty