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Home 2011
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This website is a log of my hobbies, passions and projects. It will hopefully over time fill up with helpful advice to
encourage, inspire and guide others with similar interests. rab by the way are my initials Robert Andrew Burke
June to September:
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It's
amazing that when you've got all good intentions to get stuck into a
project, life sometimes has a habit of getting in the way. Back in
April & May I redesigned my website with the intention of getting
up to speed with the new layout of Blender and writing a few more
tutorials, I had even been asked to write a book by a local publisher.
The end of May though I took on a new job as Technical Director and
Deputy Chief Executive of ICOM Energy Association. The job has taken up
a great deal of my personal time reading up on European and British
directives, regulations and standards. I have had almost no time for my
hobbies and had to put getting up to speed with Blender on the back
burner. October sees another change, with the current Chief Executive
retiring and me taking over his work as well as the technical roll. All
this means it will possibly be winter before I have any serious free
time for new Blender projects.
I have in between other work, been keeping an eye on Blender and am
very impressed with the pace of development. The Bmesh system has taken
on a new pace of development that should see it integrated within the
next four to six months. Hopefully I will then have the free time to
write a few more modelling tutorials and update the Precision Modelling
Guide.
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Cycles render engine is also looking extremely promising. As a test, I
have re-rendered the Trumpet model with Cycles and it has achieved a
far better result than I could previously achieve in Blender's internal
renderer.
The original model was constructed in 2007, but I never managed to achieve the polishe metal effect.
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Compare a higher resolution image of both renders in the Gallery section.
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May:
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It's
all change for me again this month, a new website layout and a
new job. The big one for me is the new job. The need for me to be
in the car and drive for over 3 hours a day every time I needed to be in the
office at Cheltenham, finally wore me down. Fortunately I have secured
the position of Technical Director and Deputy
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Chief Executive at ICOM
Energy Association,
which will mean a lot less travelling to and from
the office. Over the last year I have spent almost 300 hours
travelling to and from Cheltenham, which is why I have not had time to
add any new Blender projects or tutorials over the last two years.
My website was getting to the stage where I needed to split the 2010/11
tab into separate years and I also wanted to add a new menu item, to
list some of my progress with learning the piano. In total the site had
70 pages and to update the site, each page would need the menu
altering. To save having to repeat all the work again at some point in
the future, I decided to read up on PHP driven websites. The beauty of
PHP is you can include a single head banner, menu and footer file into
all of your web pages. The redesign has also added the possibility of a
drop-down menu, which is much easier to maintain and the gallery
utilises a light box to open the images. If you maintain a HTML driven
website and are a little apprehensive about making the move to PHP have
a read of Kevin Stanley's tutorial,
How to Create a PHP Website Template from Scratch
it explains the process really clearly.
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The drop-down menu was adapted from the Gibson Research Corporation pure CSS menu system, which is a CSS file that is extremely well commented and easy to adapt.
The gallery now uses the lightbox by Lokesh Dhakar, which again has proven simple to set up and use.
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I have added
the music section to the website because I am finding learning the
piano very rewarding. I am progressing slowly with being able to read
music and have just treated myself to a Yamaha Clavinova CLP 380 BE which is a tremendous high end digital piano.
Korg SP250 Stage Piano For Sale
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| It has left me with a 10 month old Korg SP250 stage piano still in
excellent condition which I am willing to sell. If anybody wants to
make me a sensible offer and is willing to collect it from Tamworth,
send me an offer on the contact form. |
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| April: |
Its been a busy time for software updates this month. The first stable release of Blender 2.57 was released on 13th April prompting a fresh look at the progress of this excellent software.
 I am often asked by users when the 608 bearing tutorial will be updated for the new look and functionality of Blender.
Whilst I don't have that much opportunity to use Blender any more, I am
still keeping an eye on progress of the upgrade. As yet I haven't found
a way to snap the knife to a vertex and constrain the cut in a straight
line. Until this feature returns (possibly not until the B-mesh
integration) it wont be possible to carry out all the steps needed to
update the tutorial.
Not only have we been spoilt with a new release of Blender this month, it's also coincided with the release of Ubuntu 11.04.
This new release featuring the Unity desktop with the impressive side
bar that looks very slick. I have only used it for a couple of days,
but already my most used applications have jumped to the front of the
menu's making it much easier to access them. I don't think it will be
long before most users grow to appreciate the new structure.
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| I have carried out a few more experiments with the parabolic solar
reflector this month. The copper water tank has been cut down, removing
the leaking heat exchanger, then re-soldered as a smaller tank.
The tank has also been insulated with a couple of inches of insulation.
The reflector surface has been changes for the 95% reflective
hydroponics film purchased last month. |
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On a quick trial the water temperature at the top of the reflector
reached 81\B0C. This has worked reasonably well but there are a few more
improvements I want to try before I am finished with the design. |
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March:
My
parabolic solar reflector has advanced on a little more this month and
I have been able to carry out a couple of very unscientific trials to
get a feel for how much heat can be generate by this type of design.
Firstly though I must stress this is a very basic prototype made from
scraps and leftovers. I haven't invested any money into the set-up
shown in the photo's. It is just a test bed for future ideas. It is
pretty evident that this is pieced together from scrap.
Since last month I have covered the parabolic curve with thick
reflective aluminium foil. The drawback from this material is that it
picks up every bump or ripple in the glue layer beneath it. Though it
conforms to the parabolic shape quite well, the surface does lose some
of its reflectivity and tends to diffuse a proportion of the sunlight
hitting it rather than focussing it directly onto the heat tube.
The first test has used a basic solar syphon with an old copper water
tank. I wasn't taking temperature measurements as the day only had
short periods of sunshine inter-seeded between a cloudy sky.
the results were that the uninsulated tank became tepid in the top
third of the tank and when improvised insulation was added to the tank
the water was raised to a temperature, comfortably warm enough to wash
in. The heat pipe running through the mirrors focus became much too hot
to touch, even when full of water, though it was a little cooler at the
bottom of the reflector.
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The outcome of this is to make a few improvements and try a slightly more efficient set-up.
I have sourced some 95% reflective hydroponics film from Hobby Hydroponics at less than \A33.00 per square metre. and am looking for a local supplier of acrylic tube to insulate the heat pipe.
The water tank has been chopped in half to remove the existing imperial
fittings and corroded heat exchangers. I will add a coil heat exchanger
(old 10mm copper tube) to saperate the solar flow from the tanks water and insulate it to a much higher standard.
Once the changes are made I will carry out another trial and hopefully post the results and a few more images next month.
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February 2011:
This month started with a bit of a shock,
Scottish Power who supply
both my electricity and gas emailed me with a message telling me that
the payments for
my energy bill was going to rise by 55%. This was bad news, especially
after
spending a few years gradually improving the thermal resistance of the
house, initially to save energy costs, but also to do my bit to help
reduce the environmental damage ot the high carbon society we live in.
The sad thing is that I pay by monthly direct debit and even though we
are at the end of a particularly cold winter my account is still in
credit. Anyway the increase in price is completely unjustifiable so I
have challenged it and am currently going through the Scottish Power
complaints process. I will be posting more on this as things develop.
What it has done is spurred me into starting the solar projects I had been thinking about for the last few years.
the 1st project will be to construct a parabolic reflector to see if I
can get some useful heat from the UK climate. The parabola will be a
bit more of a challenge than a flat plate collector as it needs to
track the movement of the sun. I think I will be able to build it quite
cheaply with redily available building materials. I will post progress
on the build as It takes shape.
The
initial design was done in Blender and has given me a enough of a start
to be able to cut out the material and construct the shape of the
parabolic curve. So far it has all been made from leftover materials.
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The curved supports are laminated from left over softwood joists, with
the face of the parabola made from 25mm floor laminate boards faceted
over the concave surface of the curved supports.
I will be experimenting through the summer with coverings of polished aluminium foil and possibly aluminised mylar sheets.
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January
2011:
I
have decided to have a go at something a little different this month.
Having spent years concentrating on mechanical models I decided to have
a go at modelling and rendering a face. Organic modelling demands a
completely new learning curve compared to what I am used to. As a
first attempt I am really happy with the outcome, though as always it
could be improved significantly given more time and skill. 
Blender
provides an excellent tool-set to work on organic modelling though it
takes a lot of research and learning to ensure the topology of the
wire-frame is suitable if you want to later animate the face model.
There is a lot of good reference to face topology and in true open
source many are freely available. The tutorial I used that helped me
learn the basics wasn't originally written for blender but the
techniques are very similar and the tutorial gave good advice on the
positioning of mesh poles and loops. The tutorial can be downloaded
from computerarts and is a must read for anyone
struggling with the concept of face modelling.
Once you have created the model of the face a realistic texture needs
to be produced to give a realistic appearance of skin , lips eyes
etcetera. Again Blender excels in its tool-set for unwrapping a 3D mesh
into a 2D UV map and it was a simple process to mark a few seams and
use Blenders powerful unwrap tool to create the 2D map of the face
layout.
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Fortunately Blenders tools don't stop there and leave you to hand paint
your own image texture. You are now able to project different face
images onto the model using multiple UV maps and from these create the
face texture using the projection paint tools. Alternatively you can
use many of the shader techniques to achieve a realistic skin.
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Finding good reference material and
explanations of the techniques wasn't easy, but there a number of very
good sites going into detail of these processes. The following I found
were of particular interest.
Face Modelling tutorial: Model
the perfect 3D face
Creating Skin shaders: Blending multilayer skin
Detailed Skin Shade information: Three
Layer SSS in Blender
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All Content © 2007 - 2013 Robert Burke, unless otherwise stated.
Please contact me if you would like to use any of this content.
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