A nice combination of Poser and Vue 6 Esprit for this image. I love silhouettes! I’m uploading this one to my e-card gallery too.

Had a fairly stressful day, engraving 50 stainless steel mugs. Perhaps because we don’t often get jobs like this, it’s a learning process every time. The last similar job was 8 months ago, and we’ve forgotten all the tricks we learned that time. But we managed it without too many mishaps. I’m hoping my client comes through on his promise of lots more work to come, so that we can at least keep in practice!

The mugs are for some motor rally taking place sometime soon, so each mug had to have the Ford and Mazda logos engraved on them. Looking for good quality graphics I came across Brands of the World - what a fantastic find! Vector graphics, perfect for engraving.

We’re having a few days of winter … of course, before that we had some real summery days! 30 degrees Celsius in the middle of June? And a beautiful rainy, cloudy day yesterday. In winter? Not really normal for these parts, although I must admit, it’s very nice. All the trees seem confused, though. After the big hail storm in April had stripped them of all leaves, I thought that would be it until October. But no, it looks like spring right now, bright young leaves popping out everywhere, glowing in the sun. The wild Fig trees have these reddish young leaves, too pretty for words. I’m just wondering what they will do when it does get cold… probably in September, the way things are going!

After many revisions, the site I’ve been working on is finally sort of live. I’m expecting to get all sorts of teething problems but in the mean time, go have a look at 4 Keepsakes Scrapbooking - the coolest scrapbooking shop in the Lowveld and the only one selling a very unique range of stencils cut by yours truly. I’m allowed to be partial, haha!

What else is new? Mmm, I’m now on Palm page 3041 of “The Acceptable Sacrifice” by Larner. Still a whiles to go, but well past half way now.

Yesterday I made a new picture called Sindbad the Seagull. My silly gallery software has a “Copyright Leoni Venter” popping up if I try to right-click, so I can just paste the thumbnail in here. Sigh. You’ll just have to go look at it in person! I’m quite happy with how it came.

All of a sudden I’m noticing some visitor activity in my gallery, which is of course a great way to stimulate my sense of responsibility for this site! So I uploaded 22 new images and will be adding more as time goes by, to provide my visitors with some unique images for their free and ad-less e-cards.

In other news, I got my car back and everything is now fine after my dad checked the other rear wheel and fastened that nut properly. I think it’s little less than criminal to work on someone’s car and then not fasten the nuts. If I had been going a little faster, we might not have come off so lightly. Unfortunately we can’t determine who worked on it last. I’ve moved, the Auto Clinic we used before has closed… ah well.

Worked all of last weekend on integrating a simple shopping cart into a website I’m doing. One day when I have it live, I’ll post a link. But not yet… (flashing back to the last scene of Gladiator … now I want to watch it again!)

Reading a few words at a time of Larner’s awesome Lord of the Rings story “The Acceptable Sacrifice”
I’ve converted it to Palm Reader format and am snatching pages any time I get. I’m on (Palm) page 2461 which is quite a bit less than half-way so I have a nice long read ahead. Can I just mention again that Larner’s stories are awesome? Well worth checking out and reading!

On the way to town today, there was a sudden thump, and a horrible scraping sound, and I had to struggle to keep the car on the road. When we finally came to a halt, we discovered that the left rear wheel was missing. Not just the wheel, but the whole hub thingy was gone. Brake fluid was dripping from severed lines. We walked around looking for the wheel but the bush is so dense there that we could find no sign of it!

Called my dad on the cellphone (luckily there was reception) and he showed up after a while. We switched vehicles, I took the bakkie to go do my deliveries and he stayed with the car, waiting for a tow-truck. Then I drove back with the bakkie, took my mom home while my dad rode into town with the tow-truck, and then I drove back to town to fetch my dad. Quite a round-about process.

My poor little car is now jacked-up at the Mazda service centre and I suppose I’ll be without wheels (literally) for quite a while. Sigh.

I’ve always wanted a program that would allow me to paint directly on a 3d model. Long ago I had a demo of Painter 3D, but it never seemed to work very well, strange things happened over seams. And it crashed a lot.

The other day I decided to have a look at the offerings these days. And found that there are some good ones, but way too expensive for me to even contemplate. And then I came across 3D-Coat.

I downloaded the demo, and bought the license about 1 hour later.

After about 2 hours of playing I had a fairly decent face texture for my attempt at Wolverine.

Another few hours and I had a texture for the suit. I re-did that one for a different look and that also didn’t take very long. 3d-coat made the whole process easy and intuitive and really fast. If I take a long time it is because I’m not good at painting stuff. Which makes what I managed in my first try all that more cool.

The program is stable and didn’t crash even when I really piled on the polygons … it did get quite slow but since it was using about 3Gb of RAM at the time for the 8.5 million polygons and numerous layers, that is to be expected.

It integrates wonderfully with Photoshop or any other 2d editor that can handle PSD files, making for easy workflow between applications.

I’m very impressed!

I converted rDNA’s free V3 skintones to work with V4. I asked them if they would make it available on their site but they only want their own team members’ stuff up there, so I’ve put it on ShareCG.

I’m hoping no-one jumps on my head for this one, lol. But I did ask. So I suppose it’s okay.

These skintones work with any skin texture you may be using, which really expands the range of characters one can make with a single decent texture. All credit goes to the rDNA team for coming up with the cool shades!

The Trofblipk arrived on the fateful evening of August 19, 1994. It was a dark and stormy night, and by such omens the townspeople should have expected the worst - but as it were, the weather provided the perfect atmosphere for the production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the school hall that Friday night.

Going by the concentration of stationary vehicles in the parking lot, the Trofblipk deduced that an important event was taking place - the ideal opportunity to announce itself and its not-quite-benign intentions to the town. It therefore slithered into the hall and interrupted an enthusiastic rendition of the ‘Time Warp’, which was a bad start.

Nothing in its week-long surveillance of the town had prepared it for the otherworldly creatures that leapt from the stage and attacked it. As it slithered down the aisle in confusion, it noticed that several prominent townspeople in the audience were dressed just as outlandishly, and they joined in the chase with glee. Finally they cornered it, yelling incomprehensible lines.

The Trofblipk reared its sinuous body to its full height. Things were not going according to its well-laid-out plan. Still…

“My name is Eddie,” it hissed. “Take me to your leader!”

*That’s* when the trouble started.

- fin -

(C) Leoni Venter 12 May 2008

This is the lazy way of blogging … I’m just copying my RB journal post!

Here’s a new bunch of somewhat interesting but unsellable photos You can click the thumbnails to get larger views (640×480).

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I worked with my Dad last week near Burke’s Luck in Mpumalanga, Souh Africa. We didn’t go see the potholes (too expensive to just run in for a few photos!) but I did get to see the top of the Blyde River Canyon from a vantage point few other tourists would get to go.

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This is a paper flower. Ok, that’s not very scientific! But the petals really are papery and if you pick them, they stay like that for months! This was also taken near Burke’s Luck.

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This is a most amazing little fungus I found in our little overgrown valley. It’s really very very small. Each one opens up like a cup and inside are these little metallic-looking balls, I suppose spores or spore packages. I’ve never seen anything like them before.

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This is just another pretty fungus.

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An amazing sunset the other day…

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This is what our back yard looked like last week right after a terrible hail storm. As you can imagine, all our garden plants were shredded. It looks like mid-winter now.

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And this is the rainbow I captured earlier this week. The bush doesn’t look too bad on this photo, but if you could have seen it before the hail, you’d know the difference

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And finally, a proper photo of my two doggies. Jack on the left, and Tessa on the right. Jack is Tessa’s younger brother. They’re Boerboels, and quite huge for the breed. And it’s very hard to get a nice pic of them. I sneaked this one through the window!

In honour of South Africa’s growing electricity crisis…

A free prop set for Poser. I haven’t tried it in Daz Studio, should work with some tweaking of the materials. Includes candle holder, candle, flame, match box, light set and textures. Set is parented to candle holder for easy scaling and translation. See readme for more info.

I’ve been learning about UV mapping. And getting some results although I can see I’ve a long way to go still. Anyway, today’s prop has a texture/bump map that only sits on one side, which is what I was shooting for. This download includes the texture map, Poser material settings as well as an attempt to make it work in Daz Studio … adequate but not great, I’m not used to Daz shaders. The render was done in Poser with no post work, and I think it came rather nicely. Background is an Apophysis fractal.