Blogs

I expect we're all finding present times to be weird and unsettling. Generally I have as little to do with the outside as I can in normal times but it's different choosing not to go out to being required to stay inside. The fact that if I run out of something or forget something or just feel like going and getting some product there and then while I could go out for things it feels like an irresponsible and dangerous thing to do so like every one I'm just staying inside limiting my trips to shops as much as I can.

I think this is the first time I've worked from home for a prolonged period of time, without having serious medical issues. Since Tuesday, Yell have been remote working all employees that are able to, and that includes all of IT.

I realized putting this together that I didn't capture a lot of footage on some of the days so I padded things out with some pictures I took.

UV resin printers used to be the high end of 3d printing they had very high resolution could make prints with a variety of properties based on the resins used and could be comparable in speed to their filament/FDM counter parts. They were also expensive and messy and complicated to use. Even some of the more consumer focussed machines like the form labs form 1 were several thousand dollars to buy and the resin for the machines was much more expensive than plastic filament used in the FDM machines.

Built some more lego

Little test piece of animation I did of a robot leg doing a single walk cycle
simple modeling materials and shoddy animation as it's just mainly a test to see how I could get the armature system to drive the pistons on the leg to make it look like it was being hydraulically driven. So the bones all use ik targets and various constraints to move the parts of the pistons automatically to line up as the leg moves

Playing with blender following a few tutorials made this. It uses a combination of dynamic paint modes and the fire simulation to take a sphere and make it look like it's burning away. Came out fairly well a few odd frames in there but still quite nice.

On Saturday I went with a friend to try the Sandbox VR Startrek Discovery experience, I haven't seen startrek discovery myself but it didn't seem to matter. My friend I went with who does follow the show said it was made with people from the show and it was an officially licensed vr thingamy made with CBS.

Sandbox vr are one of the many vr experience outfits this one was in the Hilldale Mall and they had a very nice shopfront all screens nice wood and fancy lights with a bunch of tv's showing footage from games they offered.

I came across this on a list of great games from the last year you probably haven't heard of and picked it up

Proviso: It is an early access title I know some people dislike those

anyway the basic idea is simple top down 2d space shooter edges of the screen wrap you have a little ship basic thrust based movement and directional fire not quite twin sticks as you always thrust forward (for the most part some mods alter this) you have weapons shields and ship types you fight of waves of enemies and collect orbs to upgrade

The upgrades are somewhat random

While I was out in Australia & New Zealand with Byrnie and Jen I took a bunch of video using a little DJI Osmo Pocket which has a nice gimbal to stabilize things and it shoots in 4k60 so gives reasonable image quality for something small enough to just slip in a pocket. Since it's gimbaled it can also do some fun panning timelapse shots.

I edited the Australia part of things over the christmas holiday and got round to doing the final bits and pieces the other day added a bit of voice over and so on. You can take a look here, it's something like 50% Timelapse 50% Penguins.