Time flies...

Whoa, hadn't realised how much time had passed since my last blog post.
I guess a lot of that can be put down to my dedication to my Open University modules. One Maths and one Science.
I'm enjoying both of them, but it's taking up a lot of time.

The control interface for the radio telescope.

Today was especially good, as I took part in an activity involving the remote controlling of a radio telescope at the Open University campus in Milton Keynes.
The telescope is tuned to the wavelength of radio-waves given off by large clouds of hydrogen gas, floating around in the spiral arms of the Galaxy.
The photo on the right was taken using my mobile during the session. Myself and a another student took turns positioning the telescope at different longitudes of the galactic plane.
The next part of the activity involves studying the data we got back.

Designing'ing'ing of things'ings'ings...

D20 in a glass material. (Generated image)

I had an idea for a joke D20 dice the other day, the "D20 of fail". It's on my Shapeways shop, but I haven't gotten round to buying one myself. As it doesn't seem right to order it in plastic. Metal all the way :)

After designing it I played around generating images of the dice with different surfaces...

Mock peeled-paint effect (Generated image)

It's about the size of a normal D20, slightly larger.

My intention is that it's used as a joke present, a bit like awarding the losing team a wooden spoon or a Roleplayer who constantly gets poor dice throws.

I also toyed around with designing colour prints to go on Shapeways. Here's the link to a health potion bottle. I had planned on making a larger range (stamina, speed, invisibility, usual trope...), but I got distracted.

The texture was generated by using the 'Bake' tool in Blender. It's requires a bit of getting used too, but there are plenty of decent tutorials on YouTube that demonstrate how to use it.

One thing to remember, always make sure to save any textures you're using and keep backups of the originals. It's super easy for them to get overridden and turned into 'handy' textures of the void. I.e. completely blank.

Oh, and this was my first attempt at painting a texture onto a 3D object in blender. It was the chance to use both my drawing tablet and my 3D mouse at the same time :)

I actually uploaded this to my Shapeways shop, but didn't enable it for sale. I really don't think anyone it going to want to buy this :p

Right, I think I need to collapse somewhere now and sleep.