Working for 20 years as a Manufacturing Engineer for various Aerospace companies the only 3D programs I had any interaction with were CATIA, Solidworks, AutoCad and NCAD so it is no surprise Blender is a new world. I love it!
I also enjoy most outdoor activities, fishing, hiking, camping etc. Most music and College Football (UW Huskies!). Favorite vacation spot: Hawaii.
Not really sure what to do now. Am I going to upgrade my computer or get a new one possibly better at the same or lower price. Things to ponder today.
While I make that decision I am going to be splitting this site into multiple pages based on topics etc.. I am not too familiar with WordPress and how to do this however I am sure, with a little research I will be able to figure it out. Hey, I was able to get this WordPress working wasn’t I?
I received notification the lei I purchased and am having delivered to Desiree’ has shipped and will arrive as planned before 3:00pm today.
Tax return came and I am taking the time to upgrade my hard drive to 1TB, doubling the ram to 16gig (still have room to bump to 32gig) and changing the graphics card to an Nvidia Geforce GTX 660M that should come close to doubling the speed of my current computer. I’ll put the graphics card and old hard drive into an older model laptop I have (the power supply is more than adequate) giving me a second computer for just rendering out animations while I work on this new upgrade.
It is so much more enjoyable working with materials and textures when you are NOT working with a tutorial. Tutorials point you in the correct direction, all the time with little or no explanation of what is happening when you make ajustements to the multitude of variables. Doing it yourself gives you a much more indepth learning experience, as long as you take notes of what happened when you made your changes. A trick I learned was if you are not sure what a setting will do, make a very drastic change so what you did will be very noticeable. Then back off on the adjustment so you understand exactly what is happening. At least that technique works for me.
I spent the weekend watching movies like Toy Story and Brave. It sure is somthing watching the animation in Toy Story, then the two and three then on to watching Brave. The skill of the animator and the animation films has improved so much over the years.
Lately I have been comparing the creation of materials/shaders in the properties panel the creating the same material in the compositor and it is interesting. I think I will put together a video showing what is happening in each as you build your material in one and then the other. Working on the material in the properties panel  from creation is not nearly as intuitive as in the compositor as you will see however once you see how your actions in the material panel affect how and where nodes show up in the compositor things start clicking into place.
Going to end this now as I am haveing serious network problems here at home.
Time to start organizing my videos into a searchable database of topics and techniques. It will be much easier to locate a techinque or topic I am looking for when the title given does not expressly mention it.
There are so many ways to do things in Blender I find hard to understand how people can keep all the workflows straight in their heads. Sitting at work today I realize it is just practice, over and over and finding the best solution for you. This came to me when a coworker asked me how to accomplish what I considered a very simple task in excel. He asked me to drive his computer and I was typing the code as if I was typing this sentence. Just as in Excel or CATIA all it just takes repetition.
This time I am only going to post the final result when I am finished along with pictures of the areas I thought would be tricky with my solutions, should be fun.
I started a new project Monday after noon. This one is not from a tutorial, just some random item I grabbed from my self.
A Samson condenser microphone.
May be a simple projet but there are some details that look to be trickey (for me) and I am sure I can find information to tackle the items I have problems with as they occur.
