Month: September 2022

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Fun with the Snowbirds

When I make an animation, it’s an iterative process. The main thing I had to tweak in yesterday’s birthday animation for my Dad was the smoke trails from the jets – so I end up with a bunch of short renders as I tried different techniques or settings out… Usually these just get shuffled to a dusty corner of my hard drive, but I thought I’d string a few of these together along with the soundtrack of part of the Snowbirds performance a few years back at the Terrace air show to show part of the process… You’ll notice that the smoke changes slightly in these as I try different things out. The river run at the end was just another tangent I went off on during the process (it happens a lot!!).
I use the open source software Blender to make these – it’s free to download and use forever from blender.org if anyone else wants to give it a go…
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Photogrammetry: Antique Oliver OC3

I experimented with a few different photogrammetry projects over the summer – where a series of images are turned into a 3d model.  I’ve been using some open source software called Meshroom to do this.  Click on the image below to check out the 3d scan of this old Oliver OC3.  NOTE – this may take from a few seconds to a few minutes to load depending on your computer and Internet speed, and may not work on older computers!

Use your left mouse button to rotate the screen around and your scroll wheel to zoom in and out.  Note – there are a bunch of holes, etc in the model – this is just a function of the picture scanning/model reconstruction process (some of my pictures weren’t good enough!).    It’s not really as rough as it looks here – this old OC3 was running when it was parked…