Monthly Archives: October 2014

Old versus new

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A fusion of a previous chess scene with a concept developed by my eldest son, this combines my love for robotics and appreciation of the jarring oddities in life that makes things that much more interesting.

There is no rule that states robots may not play chess, but why would they? Who is this robot playing against? Which colour is it playing? Is this the last move of the game? To all these questions, the surrealist would answer: “A fish”. Of all the potential responses, such ingenuity and lateral thinking perhaps suits this image best.

chess scene render 08 HD

A serendipitous layer malfunction (I forgot to turn the lights on, basically) and some tweaking resulted in a Tron homage. I’m not really sure which one I prefer.

chess scene render 05

Preview your 3D prints

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Recently I was approached to produce a cloak clasp consisting of two buzzard’s heads. Well, that part was easy enough, but in this case I realised the client needed something more than just render to look at.

Buzzards cloak clasp

So using the powers granted to my by sketchfab, I uploaded the model to a password-protected page for him to preview at his leisure, and here is the clever bit: in 3D, in any modern browser (i.e. Chrome or Firefox) without installing any additional software.

Marvellous what these new-fangled machines can do.

A sticky Alt key

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Blender offered up a strange problem the other day. For some reason, the Alt key was behaving as if it was sticking, making it impossible to Alt-select edges.

I finally tracked this down to a keyboard shortcut I had set up for alternating between languages. This is quite simple to do in Ubuntu and offers up all sorts of possibilities, and I had set it to change when pressing both Shift keys simultaneously.

Once that was changed to something else (Windows key and Space bar) everything worked hunky-dory.

Update:

In a recent re-install of Ubuntu, I cam across the same problem, but this time the above solution did not work. It was resolved by doing the following:

Use CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm – install it if you need to), click through to the “Windows Management” subsection and then click into “Move Window”. In the “Initiate Window Move” option, change the button value from <Alt>Button1 to (for example) <Super>Button1. Hey presto, you can now move windows by holding down the Windows key and Button1 on your mouse, and Alt for loop select will work just dandy!