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Another day wasted playing with Blender, and a radically different idea for what the Arlo might look like. This looks more like a spaceship (the other looked more like a space station). It's got Star-Trek-style engine nacelles, cargo containers strapped on the sides, and a kind of dirty surface for the big cargo cylinders. I tacked on cargo bay doors and a radar dome, and gave it three crew decks in the core, along with the three huge cylndrical cargo areas. The hardest thing was making the nine cargo containers inside a lattice frame.  |
Arlo 7.0  Another wasted day...I've been telling myself that learning new stuff is good for me. In the last ten days, I've learned an entire new software package, Blender, along with a new way of thinking about the composition of three-dimensional images. Blender has an insanely complicated interface, and I've only used maybe 10% of it. But it was still a stiff learning curve. It was easy finding videos on how to do stuff--there are tons of them. But...they all kind of start in the middle of how to do something. That means stopping the video and asking things like, "where on blender is the materials properties tab?" More often than not, you get an answer for, say, Blender 3.2, but the interface *changes* with each version--they are up to version 5 now. It's like they all learned how to program from Microsoft, which does exactly the same thing with Office products. But...this is MUCH worse, because the interface is so complex. If you're interested in HOW complex, I blogged about the detials: https://maxgriffin.net/blender-basics/ |
| To be clear, my complaint has more do with the interface changing and not the comlexity of the task. Indeed, the task of creating a 3D object is inherently complex. Learning that task is a challenge for two reasons. The first is, of course, the complexity itself, which is what makes how-to videos useful. The second reason is that interface changes make how-to videos interface-dependent and hence version-dependent. That's especially challenging for beginners, even beginners like me with lots of exerience in learning new software. In fact, how-to videos are useful for even simple tasks--I used one this morning to remind me how to descale my no-longer-new espresso machine. Badly written instructions would say, "push the descaling button." But which button is that? There are lots of buttons on my expresso machine. Better instructions might say verbaly describe the location, the kind of verbose gobbledy-gook instruction you get on most written instructions. Better would be a picture with the correct button highlighted--show, don't tell, right? But a video is all show, hence videos are useful even for this kind of simple task. But now imagine that every time I wanted to descale my machine (every six months or so), the company changed the configuration of my espresso machine and the "correct" button moved from the front of the machine to behind a panel on the back of the machine? That makes the original how-to video (or my memory) useless since I can't find the right button. Sure, such move might even make sense in a way, since I only need to push that button every six months or so, but reconfiguring the location would make finding it a challenge. Of course, the company can't change the configurition of my espresso machine--it's hardware, not software. But programs like Word or Blender are software, and configurations get changed. Sometimes the changes make sense (although why Microsoft turns off useful features by default escapes me). Sometimes they just seem capricious. But they change. Where things are located in prior (or just different) versions of Word changes, so you have to find a video that matches version you're using. The point is that (a) the software is complex because it's doing complex things; and (b) the interface changes from version to version, which makes learning the necessarily complex tasks more difficult. |
Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  - Max, thanks for your explation. Always appreciate hearing about what you do as it helps me learn more about current technology. It seems things that work well are always changing. You just get learn or get use to an item and they improve it, so they say. I am pretty good at figuring out things, worked in various businesses during my life and usually the is more than one way to do something. I so appreciate videos. Even the worst seem to have something of value to offer. Thanks again for sharing your tech struggles and overall knowledge. |
Yesterday, Charles 🐾   challenged me to write a blog that listed six things people don't know about me. Of course, there are lots of things people don't generally know about me. Some of them are things better kept secret. Most of them are things not worth knowing in the first place. Finding six things in the intersection of "not embarrassing," "not boring," and "not generally known" turned out to be more of a challenge than I'd expected. But, did come up with a list. It's kind of rambling, but that's a hazard of old age. Did you know I'm 75? If not, that makes seven things. Anyway, here's my list. "Six Things You Don't Know About Me"  |
| Latest version of the Arlo...Lots of little tweaks to this one. My idea is that ships in the class are modular, depending on the attached pods. Also, the pods are themselves detachable and separately maneuverable, so each ship in the class can be reconfigured. In particular, ships could be mixed cargo and passenger (like the Arlo), or just cargo, or all passenger, or troop transport, or even a hospital ship.  |
New Year Ninjas 🥷🏻🍾  - Pay for play? That's odd. You can get the free version of Blender here: https://www.blender.org/download/ No pay-for-play, not to download and not to run the program. However, the interface is...complex. |
| New Year Ninjas 🥷🏻🍾 - I cobbled something together on the basic interface, with screen shots. It's so much easier to do this kind of thing on my website, so I put it there. https://maxgriffin.net/blender-basics/ Is this what you were looking for? |
| ...if you read binary... 01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01110111 00100000 01001000 01101111 01101100 01101001 01100100 01100001 01111001 0111001 is ASCII for 'Happy Holidays' |
| Somehow, everyone fits into the same spectrum. I have favourite colours, but I find all light beautiful. |
| I can't recall exactly, but I remember that the letters stand for either Ask Santa Claus In Icelandic or All-purpose Symbolic Code for Information Interchange. Do I win a cookie? |
Always Humble Poet PNG- 📓  - I just re-read my comment. That sounds like a great quote, and to think I thought of it! |
| A new image for the Arlo this morning. I added ONE thing that was *insanely* difficult to figure out. Blender changed how to do it in Blender 5, and exactly NONE of the links on "how to" worked with the new version of Blender. Frustrating, especially as it turned out to be not terribly hard, just obtuse. I wonder if it's even obvious what I added? |
Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - but I just checked your notebook, and those were already there in the previous post  I never had patience with "spot the difference..." |
Amethyst Snow Angel  - I didn't make a new file here--i just put the new image in the the fileI posted here yesterday. trust me--it was a new image sitting in the file from yesterday. |
| Every year my local writing group's holiday party includes an exercise where we each write a short, holiday-themed story. I had an awful time getting inspired this year, and wound up dashing this 1000 word pun off at the last minute. It's a crappy story, and everyone groaned at the pun. I guess that means it was successful, at least as a pun. Here it is. Remember, you were warned! "The Yuletide Rebel" |
| I've finally got an image of the Arlo that is about 90% of the way I envision it looking. It needs some laser canons and radar masts added, but those should be pretty easy to do. The two big things were getting the parts proportioned so they "photographed" well and getting an appropriately run-down look for the skin. Clicking on the image will take you to the associated stories...Maybe this weekend I'll have time to add another story... |
Another wasted day...I've got what I think is close to the final image of the Arlo, though. This one shows both crew pods, cargo pods (with a bay for the shuttles), and has way more interesting engines. At this resolution, a lot of the detail doesn't show, though. Click on the image to go to the folder with the related stories. There's a higher resolution version, along with a bit more about the stories, on my website at https://maxgriffin.net/drawing-spaceships/  |
After endless struggles with Blender, I think I've finally got a picture of the Arlo I like. Now that that's done, maybe I can actually write another story in the series. (The image links to the folder with the two stories so far.)  |
| Wow. For some reason, I seem to have hit the jackpot this year on Quills nominations. I've counted at least five nominations as of today, including one for fiction. My fiction hasn't been nominated for a Quill in years, so I'm wondering what's different about this year? In any case, thank you to the kind souls who have showered me with these unexpected accolades.  |
How I've wasted the last three days...I discovered Blender, free 3-D modelling software. It's free, so I can't complain about the interface, but I do like the image it made of the Arlo (the spaceship in "Jase and the Arlonauts" ) better than the AI image I got from fiddling with Create.Microsoft.com.  |
How I wasted today: I used Microsoft.Create.Com to generate AI images of the crew of the Arlo--see "Jase and the Arlonauts" for the two stories so far in this series. Microsoft's product is doing *much* better with faces than the last time I tried this. It took a half-dozen iterations on each to get an image I was happy with, starting from the description I wrote in the stories. Cas and Perce are twins (actually, clones), so I just did one image and flipped it to get both twins.  |
| David Gerrold has a Facebook post on AI that I find insightful. He sees its potential as a tool for human creativity. The link works and takes you to FB (I know...). It's also a bit slow, so be patient, but it's worth reading. |
| Thanks for sharing this, I agree with him! I like how he mentions the different technological advances through history |
Ace Corona  - There's also a comment about how AI can open up opportunities for neurodivergent people--I wholly agree with that, also. |
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I honestly like both designs, though I agree that the cube-shaped sections do look a little incongruous with the rest of the ship.
A cargo ship would make best use of cubes, but they don't have the aerodynamic look we tend to associate with air- and space-craft. Aerodynamics would be a silly consideration though, in the airless vacuum of space. So, as my brother also said often, "It's six of one, a half-dozen of the other."