Under the Beret

The Space Babe Sorting Helmet has sorted me into House Pfizer.

I wonder if this book is any good.

The choice seemed clear to me: A life of drag queens, safe spaces, and sharing booths with Aubrey Plaza, or a lifetime of straight bars, creepy white families, and code-switching with Mackenzie Davis — who is usually very hot but was done dirty with a poorly-fitted wig (sorry!! She was!!!).

— Jill Gutowitz, “Why Abby Absolutely Should’ve Ended Up With Riley In Happiest Season“

I’m not gonna lie: I was surprised by how hurty this Christmas movie was.

Never make a promise or plan
Take a little love where you can
Nobody’s on nobody’s side
Never stay too long in your bed
Never lose your heart, use your head!
Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never take a stranger’s advice
Never let a friend fool you twice
Nobody’s on nobody’s side
Never be the first to believe
Never be the last to deceive
Nobody’s on nobody’s side

— “Nobody’s on Nobody’s Side”, from Chess.

My first foray into normal maps. Trek frequently uses this particular texture — often on pillars or support structures. It’s simple enough, but the extra detail would add a lot of geometry to a model.

Thus normal maps. Normal maps say, “pretend that this flat surface has extra detail on it, and use that pretend detail when you calculate light interaction.” It’s all pretend, but it’s a special form of pretend that can be hardware-accelerated.

Basically, to make this work I have to create a model of complex geometry and use a Blender tool to create (“bake”) a normal map by projecting onto a much simpler shape. The end result is a very blue-coloured image that I can use in other models.

Net result: the surface is flat. It just doesn’t look flat. And if you look at the bounce light from the floor, that bounce light is emphasizing the texture shape.

Like I say: first foray. I barely know what I’m doing.

I think I’ve managed to restore cross-posting to Dreamwidth functionality. Dreamwidth recently changed the way it handles authentication, and my WordPress plugin broke. (Dreamwidth’s post includes the words “breaking changes to older clients” and, hey, it broke my older client. (Are there any newer clients, though?)

I’ve been trying to grow my skill with Blender, and a big part of my approach has been to re-model some stuff that I’d previously modelled in SketchUp.

And, yes, there’s more Star Trek stuff, ’cause that’s what I was mostly toying with when I was playing with SketchUp.

An early re-model was this wire-framed chair that shows up in some of the later TNG movies.

Blender has some different approaches to particular modelling tasks. In this case, I was using curves to get the frame of the chair. Basically, I draw out the lines that the frame follows, and then give those lines some substance, making it seem like it’s made of metal tubing.

It me.

Blender 2.82 is here to power up your pipeline with UDIM support, Pixar USD export, physics improvements, a new AI-accelerated denoiser and much more! https://t.co/YYTsYh1ZYc #b3d

— Blender (@blender_org) February 14, 2020