Vacations are done and I am back to work for the rest of the year. I love these end of the year/beginning of the year vacations. It gives me a lot of memories to look back on and more adventures to look forward to. One thing to mention, I planted the seed of traveling with my sisters every year and all three of them are actually thinking about doing just that. As Diane would say, ‘That is very exciting”.

This is the latest material I created with Blender 2.81a and the Unity course “Creating 3D environments in Blender”.

Coming up…. Pictures from our trip to the Mountain.

I have not used Blender much while they have been updating from 2.79 to 2.8 and wow am I impressed.

Here is the new interface:

There are new tool icons, the ‘T’ key layout is completly different with just icons, the ‘N’ key panel has close to the same functionality. There are no layers anymore but collections making good sense and there are two new renderers, Eevee and workbench eevee, much like cycles is for your final renders as well as real time rendering in the viewport and workbench is for the viewport while modeling. Both are great additions.

My first course for Unity this year is “Creating 3D Environments”. I have had this course on my wish list for some time because it was quite expensive, about 150.00. It went on sale for the new year for 19.99. I jumped at the chance. The course was also recently upgraded for Blender 2.81. The first part of the course focused on the new interface and the basics of modeling. I have not forgotten much of that. Then there was an introduction to the Eevee render engine. At the end I added my own touches to the render. I added my own envronment texture, a 360 photo taken with the GroPro Max at my office downtown Tulsa, OK. I also added a different color to the plane the dice are sitting on with a little bit of reflections of the environment. I think Eevee is awesome. I took less than 10 seconds to render this out. The last time I made a render similar to this, a few batteries quite a few years back, the render took over 30 minutes to complete.

Insta360 has announced a new 360 camera. The Insta360 One R. I am hoping it will be out for sale on Tuesday. If it is I will snap it up on the way home. It is what they call an adaptive camera with the ability to convert from a 4K action camera with a front or rear facing screen depending on how ‘you’ set it up and then with a few quick changes it becomes a 5.6K 360 camera. This camera along with the GoPro Max may become my go to cameras always with me.

More textures coming up in the next chapters of this course.

Yes, I am finally back from vacation and as I said before I will be going back to the beginning on this website. To its roots, Blender. Other topics started to pop up a few years ago and I got seriously distracted and off target.

I won’t be scaling back my interests, those will remain because some of them are part of my past. Chess will be a topic as will photography. My new interests cooking and Drones will also be present as well. All of these topics will be taking up their own spaces within this site they will not be taking up space on the main page.

Adding the new sections of the site will take a little bit of time, I’ll have to tweak WordPress to do this and I’m not all that familiar but it should not be too difficult.

In the mean time Blender posts will take front and center with food items coming up section which will also include photography (I’ll be taking pictures of the food) followed by drone news and Chess. After about a month the items other than Blender will be taking residence on their own spaces.

Enjoy the ride, I will be.