I'm Back!

 I'm back - well, actually, I never went away but you could be forgiven for thinking I had. My last entry on this blog was almost 2 years ago and basically it was telling you that the YouTube channel was becoming a vlog - a weekly summary of what I'd been up to and things that had caught my eye in the previous week. I did that for about a year but never produced anything on the blog to go along with it - the videos alone were taking far too long to edit and there was no time or inclination left for me to produce write-ups too.

So I stopped the vlog in May 2022 - it wasn't really a conscious decision, it just kind of happened.

But lately I've been thinking about rebooting it, mainly because I've spent the last month or two learning Blender and I wanted to create a lasting record of the things I've learnt. If you don't know what Blender is, it's a brilliant piece of Open Source software for creating 3D models and animations. It does CGI, basically. It isn't really used much in industry, but it's a brilliant learning platform because it does have a load of features, some of them quite advanced. And it's free.

Another great thing about Blender is there's a ton of videos and tutes online. Some of them are brilliant. Most of them aren't and a whole lot of them are a total waste of pixels. My tutorials, of course, will be absolutely superb. The intention is to make it a sort of learning journal, and I will show alternative ways of doing things as well as things that don't work out.

I'm not planning to make the channel 100% Blender - I'll probably do tutorials for other software that I use and if I get any interesting new toys I'll do reviews of those. So, the first Blender episode shows you how to make a Kilner jar, its lid and a rubber seal, and it also shows you the settings for a realistic glass material and a rubber material for the seal. In the second episode I'll show you how to model the wire loops at the top of the jar and around the lid, and also the hinge mechanism and the closing latch. Episode three will feature making (virtual!) pasta, filling the jar with it and setting up and rendering an animation.