Man oh man, the flu came back with a vengeance over the weekend. I did not let my time of from work go to waste. I cooked all three meals from HelloFresh and did some 3D pano tours with some new software.

Yes, the crud I have suffered through since I have been back from vacation finally left last Saturday. With that, first here is the final render of the brick texture created and the first renders of some grass.

I’ll start with another record. I submitted my tax return on Monday the 27th, one day earlier than last year. If the last two years is any indication I should have received my return back on Friday the 31st of January. So, the records are 1) Earliest to Submit, 2) Earliest to receive, 3) First time to receive in January. These may change because I am creating this post on Tuesday before I get my return back. I am relying on past years experience for this.

Now on to the elephant in the room. I stopped working in Blender for a bit. Why you may ask. Well, I am very sick. I caught a nasty flu bug on the way home from Seattle and missed my first two days back to work, went to work on Monday, left early and am home again on Tuesday. I’m hoping to go back on Wednesday and then may be able to include something new on this post if I have a good weekend. I won’t hold my breath though… because I cant’…

Here is a render of the latest material from the Udemy course “Creating 3D environments in Blender”

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.

Now that I have begun to establish the new routine or more like, ‘The new normal’ it is time for me to get back to what this site was all about in the beginning, Blender. I’ll start relegating the additional posts about health etc. to other sections of the site but leave the main theme as Blender modeling.

It was a great weekend again.

I rode another 13 miles, keeping with my goal of increasing the mileage per ride each time out. This will stop of course but I’ll keep increasing until 20 – 25 miles per ride is reached.

My DJI Mavic Mini finally arrived on Friday. What a great little drone. I charged everything up and waited to take flight for the first time Saturday morning. It flew like a champ indoors, very steady. I kept it in cinematography mode indoors to keep the speeds down. I was quite impressed. My favorites are still the Mavic Pro series and the air (speed and flight modes)

I had a great time cooking again with Hello Fresh. Saturday I made Sirloin steak with mashed potatoes, the potatoes were not quite firm but firm enough but that was my fault. I have pics to post but the masking was not up to what I feel was good so I’ll post when I get a good mask done.

Sunday I made two items, Sesame Tacos that were FANTASTIC.  I kept that recipe to make again and again it was so good. The second was a roasted chicken with a crunch parmesan crust and spaghetti with a cream cheese and tomato (grape size) sauce. That also was very good. Pics are coming of those as well.

Speak of pics, I had my new lights and field monitor in use for these shots and I think they turned out pretty good. Next I need to learn to set the custom white balance and maybe set the camera angle a bit different, possibly try directly from the top.

Only three days of work this week and all of those are going to be a little slow. After that I have two weeks and one day until three weeks off for Christmas. I am starting to get into the Christmas mood and will be setting up some new decorations this year. I have not purchase yet but will during my Thanksgiving four day weekend and maybe hit some of those black Friday and cyber Monday sales.

Pics coming, I promise.

I’ll catch up tonight. I want to save my record of Mondays