Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt2

This base build is very time consuming, mainly due to the requirement to allow layers to dry and set before proceeding onto the next layer.  As such when I move onto the two other models I'm going to make both ships at the same time, this is so that I'm using the same materials at multiple times across the pair.

As mentioned before the first colour layer was put down and covered, I have since repeated this, layering the tissue paper and 50:50 PVA to water mix and softening or adding wavelets as I've gone.

As this dried you can see the previous colour layer coming through quite strongly.  But before more colour could go on it needed now to dry completely.

So, I set about mounting the black plastic hull base from the model itself.

First a test fitting into the wave front for the bow...

 Then I spent time cleaning up the base to allow the line of the hull to sit into the sweeping water feel now built up...And once I was happy I drilled two holes in this base...

Through them I then pushed a cocktail stick...

Cutting it neatly and then adding a dot of superglue to fix them in place, these are now through the plastic and into the polystyrene, but they're not permanent, the base can be pulled off, it's only held by a little excess PVA and the sticks.

Adding the weight, stuck down with a liberal swish of superglue completes this preparation...

And a hull test fit confirms things are going to work out....

Next, with thinner I took aquamarine and blue/green acrylic paints and gave a nice but randomly shaded 

At this point the base has been left to dry for 24 hours.

I plan to pick out the wave crests with some white and add a little more detail to the wake, but the base colour, wave shape and layers of modelling are done.

We'll return to the base only for the edges needing colour and building our frame and badge.

On to some actual model painting!

See the other parts here:

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4

Raw Graphics Engine : C++ Project

It has been a whilst since I had a personal improvement project grace these pages, so here's one I started over the weekend.... A graphics engine.

Sure this is something I play about with all day in the office, we're writing games!  That's literally my job, but I've been a system engineer for such a very long time, and I've seen all these sparkly things coming from folks working on game play and wanted some sparklies of my own.

I therefore began two projects, both are graphics engines, but they're very different from one another... one is in Vulkan, which is not what we're talking about here, no we're talking about the other one... And this is a graphics engine I've written myself.

It's gone through three phases since Saturday, Sunday and then just tonight.  The first phase was setting up the basic rendering, getting a triangle on the screen and making it flat (orthographic) projection.

The engine is written in C++, uses SDL2 for the window and renderer, but the engine itself does all the geometry transforms through linear matrix mathematics that I hand crafted, and it reaches into the third dimension in orthographic mode.

The shapes can be rotated, scaled, translated, the usual.  But before I drove myself mad with writing shapes by hand on graph paper, I wrote a very simple importer for the very simple Milkshape 3D model editor, and started with a sphere:

Milkshape has appeared on these pages before and is really the only modelling package I'm familiar with, I really do need to learn Blender don't I?

So with models loading I got a little adventurous:

This mesh really stresses my single core linear mathematics, so I started to switch it out in favour of GLM tonight:

// Model

glm::mat4 model(1.0f);

model = glm::translate(model, trans);

model = glm::rotate(model, glm::radians(angleZ), { 0, 0, 1 });

model = glm::rotate(model, glm::radians(angleY), { 0, 1, 0 });

model = glm::rotate(model, glm::radians(angleX), { 1, 0, 0 });

model = glm::scale(model, glm::vec3(scale.x, scale.y, scale.z));

So, that's been my three days.. I'm interested where and what I will do with this engine.

However, Vulkan, that's the other thing I'm learning.

Rabbit Scratch

OUCH!

We've had a bit of drama with Bob, our new bunny.  First he's cut his own ear open... 

So he literally has skinned the back of his ear, leaving only cartilage.  The vets saved this and curled it back and he wore this hair roller like contraption to save the skin...

He was not impressed...

However today, after a week of healing he managed to pull the half healed skin back off!  To tomorrow he's got to have an operation to try and remove the flap without loosing half his ear.

Now, because that skin lived for a little bit and had a blood supply is has let a bit of healing start, which is good... but right now it's a bit raw until he goes in tomorrow morning.

As for his scratching my chest, I was taking him back to his hutch and he got excited to jump in and just.... yeah... Hurts like hell.

Updated Tutorial - Installing SVN (Subversion) on Ubuntu 14.04 Server

Back in May 2012 I posted a pretty complete tutorial on how to create a virtual VMware machine image for ubuntu, install apache2 and svn upon it, and configure it for access over your LAN.

Tonight, I've just migrated that very installation to a new Ubuntu Server 14.04 installation on a new XenServer.

And I noted I needed to add an extra line of configuration, therefore, I've added a little video note, which also shows the server working for me locally on my LAN:

The original tutorial can be found in it's full glory here: http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/virtualizing-installing-and-using.html

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