Andrew (R.S Admin) @ajroach42@retro.social

My battery died, though, and it's late so I'm going to bed.

I probably won't play with blender at all tomorrow or this weekend, but it's still on my mind.

The UI in blender 2.8+ is a big improvement over 2.79 in terms of usability!

It's still taking some time to figure out where everything is, but I've gotten pretty good at basic animation paths, camera movements, etc.

I even figured out how to do some particle effects that I don't hate!

Still need to figure out textures. That's going to be the big one for me to get the look I want. Then I can focus on all the little flourishes that'll sell the animation.

@thor That's great to know, thank you.

I'm on a more powerful computer running a more recent version now,

I haven't figured out Rendering Layers yet, but that might be pretty useful at some point. I can see where it could also be pretty limited, because camera movements.

Thanks for the info! I'll be sure to tag you if I run in to any questions, and i appreciate the offer.

@ashley Just glancing over this, but it looks pretty excellent. Thank you for putting it together.

https://mountaintown.video/videos/watch/cc99379c-6bd3-447d-bdf2-16deac30abd1

That's backgrounds sorted. Now to figure out textures and force.

@qwazix I've got a couple of decommissioned Xeon web servers that I've honked a couple 2060s in to. I should be alright, I was just using the wimpiest machine I have access to becuase it's the one I use for my day job.

@kazuma I don't see an option for eevee, but I'll check on my other machine running newer software.

Backgrounds slow down rendering Dramatically!

This isn't super surprising, and I'm still using Wildly underpowered hardware.

It's rendering about one frame every thirty seconds.

Thankfully, I have several computers of significantly more power, and I pretty much understand how to Do this thing now.

Here's a render of my first attempt to animate a spaceship flying through space with camera movement.

https://mountaintown.video/videos/watch/d7d8e983-8b9e-4aff-89ac-59912ed13bb0

Now I need to figure out textures + backgrounds.

I am sure I just don't understand one of these options. The UI exposes a lot of pretty powerful stuff, after all, and I'm trying to use it on a 10 year old laptop.

... I should just drag out a more powerful machine and see how many problems that solves.

Wow, the blender UI is obtuse.

I'm starting to figure out the basics. I can import models and animate them. I have an okay grasp of all that.

I made textures for my spaceships. I made a background, and then the textures for the ships disappeared.

It should be easy to apply a basic texture and color to an object, make a starfield background, and export an image or a video that does not lose the texture, the background, or both.

@drewzero1 I was really looking forward to it too! I still want to do it, I just have to do it differently than I had planned.

I should start with the DIY media one, but I definitely have blender open.

- book binding

I bind books. I'd like to show people how. It's easy.

- BASIC

I keep coming back to the idea of doing a video on BASIC, but I don't know what that actually means.

- specific pieces of media

Video based scholarship on public domain works is pretty lacking. Sometimes it's even hard to find reviews in text. I feel like there's an opportunity there, and that I'm reasonably well suited to help.

- Specific pieces of tech

I was planning to do a whole tech show when I still lived in VA and had the space to store all the stuff and build a set. I don't anymore, so I can't do that the way I wanted to, but I still have a couple of unique and interesting pieces of technology I'd like to demo and maybe talk a little about.

- Specific vintage toys

The Great Garloo (of which I have one),tomland and AHI knockoffs (of which I have a few), Paco Dino Warriors (I think I have all of them) and various other official knockoffs and legitimate bootlegs would make interesting topics for videos.

- My (adopted) home town

I'd love to sit down and talk to some hometown heroes about themselves and the work that they do. Intersperse with b-roll of the mountains, the rivers, the lakes, etc.

We didn't "all" make it.

Only those of us that survived "made it" we're loosing thousands of people a day to an avoidable crisis, we deported thousands, we executed hundreds.

We didn't "all" make it.