K is for Kitchenalia!

All sorts of stuff has come out of the woodwork, or the kitchen cabinets over the last three years, some I've photographed, some has gone to storage, some went to charity and some went in the bin. Here's three pieces of kitchenalia which may trigger the odd nostalgia button or two?

 

I can half-remember the birthday party where these were used, and they were 'dead posh' and modern, bring plastic rather than waxed-paper/card (how times have changed!), but it has left them brittle. They did have matching Magic Roundabout paper plates and napkins/serviettes, and I think the cake was Mum's rendition of Dougal dog!

 

Every 1970's kid appreciated a curly-wurly drinking straw, didn't they? I think they did, even if they didn't admit it! I seem to recall these were Christmas stocking presents one Christmas morning, and would have been christened with milk or tea . . . possibly milk with food-dye in it, as "It's Christmas"!

Kiddy cutlery, the cat was usually mine, the snoopy was my Brother's and I think we shared the Disney knifes, depending upon who grabbed which first! I should find some kid/s to pass them on to, but all my friends' kids have grown-up and gone to collage! Maybe a hospice for kids would be a thought?

F is for Fatabet - the Slimfont of Self-indulgence!

Yeah, there'll be a few of these going forwards too; it's my Blog! We’re back to early ideas of mine which were fleshed-out when I got stuck into CAD, but this one goes back to my childhood, or - at least - teenage flirtations with design, and my attempt at an alphabet or font I originally called 'Fatabet', pronounced fat-a-bet, for obvious reasons!

The pages of my old sketch-book from collage, back in 1981-3, and my attempts to design an alphabet in which all the letters were contained within a circle; I think there were a couple in the 1970's; Lettraset did one with smiley-faced suns I think, but despite having both Lettraset and Mechaorama catalogues, I didn't crib from them (if they come out of storage I'll compare the closest, but they may have been lost in a flood back in 2007?), and sort of gave-up when I couldn't solve a couple of letters, the 'B' was one and the 'D' which still niggles!

However, CAD was an obvious opportunity to have another stab at the old idea, and I quickly got some geometric rules established and started playing around with the harder letters and some punctuation. You can see that 'B' (and 'D') along with 'Q' are coming out of the circle and I'm still not 100% happy with the first 2, the 'Q' however works, as it's already an odd-one!

I quickly used it for my signature block on all my drawing files/print-outs, and started thinking about other treatments; most fonts have a bold and italic version, so in playing-around I've ended up with several potentials!

And yes, the Fatabet got renamed Slimfont, although I know I could never use Fatboyslim, or Slimshady commercially, or not without passing many pieces of silver to two guys who probably have enough already!

Slimshady actually gave me the ultimate version (see below), while I don't think I named the one bottom-left, which ought to be Slim Outline but I already used Slimout for the standard font, so maybe Slim Jazzy?

Here we see CAD'ed versions of Slimwall (greenish) and Fatboyslim (multicoloured), which - latter - gave me the idea for a Christmas card I think I posted here at the time - 2012? With a construction stage at bottom left, before I'd positioned the light-source for the shadows, and at bottom right, my prepared design doubled for printing on A3 card-stock.

Which is here again! Well, it's only about six weeks away now! You use a single 'light' so the lines from the shadows, followed-back through the letters, all go to a single vanishing-point to enhance the 3D effect of the letters floating over the 'card' on the card!

And no matter how bad the year's been I hope over the next few weeks, your Christmas this year shapes up to be better than the last two - it can't just keep getting worse . . . can it?

Some other stuff, even in the digital age, it seems a lot of paper still finds its way into the project folder, not all of it explainable, but clearly I've started tackling the numbers and looking at font-size or kerning (ratios of gaps between certain pairs of adjacent letters) or something!??

I don't think I ever progressed beyond the numerals you can see here (left) or have even got to choosing a final from some of those where there are alternatives shown, but I was doing it in college-time and had other stuff to get on with.

Once I had a near finished alphabet (right) I moved on to other things and haven't got much further, I tweak something from time to time, but time's short these days, although I hope one day to put a finished version on a free-site like DAFonts.

One change you may have noticed is that the parallel line 'rule' established by the original 'A' and 'B' from my teenage version, which was carried on with the 'C', 'E' and 'F' (still not happy with 'D'!) and then taken through the whole alphabet, has now been dropped for 'W' following the enforced  'angle rule' for 'X' and 'Y', which I think makes it much better, the 'W' isn't just an upside down 'M', but a new letter in its own right!

Indeed you wonder if the reason all those angled letters are all at the back-end of the alphabet ('Z' is another) might be because when they were codifying it (monks? a Caesar?), they'd run out of strait and curved shapes/combinations which were suitably different from each other!

But back to Slimshady . . . once I was 3D CAD'ing more complicated solids than the pulled-out 2D of Fatboyslim, the obvious final progression was a fully 3D Fatabet (top right), which replaced my signature panel on the 'paper space' drawing files - main/left-hand image, taking the original circular disc concept to a full sphere.

New 'W' mind! The constriction of boolean geometries meant some simplification to get the curved ogee 'edges' to go-in properly! In simple terms, boolean means "Right, OR wrong, there is NO grey", and if your invisible mesh, underlying everything, has a single fault, the whole thing is 100% wrong!

I'm actually tackling a letter 'R' in the bottom-right shot and you can see how you pull-up the 2D 'R' (white lines), leaving you with an extruded, R-shaped rod (red lines), which you then subtract from a solid sphere (pink Lines) leaving you with a stable ball-letter, that then needs some sharp-edges rounding-off, which is where it can all go very wrong; if the continuous ogee (which runs right around the edges of each 'trench' or hole) won't go-in when told to!

For instance, the ogee running round the larger trenches in the 'H', have to have a greater radius than the smaller trenches in the 'W', which can affect the visual uniformity of the different letters in the alphabet, a uniformity which is precisely what I've been trying to achieve sine 1981! 'D' notwithstanding - the bastard, so; you have to compromise at each stage, but these two look OK together  . . . I think?

And . . . it's all good fun, that's the thing, it's another skill, it's another life-experience, you know? Another box ticked in an otherwise miserably short life. Parachuting is still on the list!

P is for Petulant Pepperpot Peters-out Protesting Punishment

Well, it's sort of finished, and I've definitely put it to bed for now, these are both screen-captchas from my laptop, which while managing to handle the file-size without crashing like the studio machines, also leaves a bit to be desired in the resolution stakes, probably WHY it can handle the graphics - less info per inch!!

This was the final printout, it's a bit crowded for an A4/A3 sheet (we actually printed it in A3 and it's not too bad), but I'm hoping to get it printed A2 on the high street at some point, for the portfolio, and it's designed to show of a range of skills for a potential employer, who will hopefully realise that I can arrange things just as neatly with a little more room!! The grey box-lines and boarder shadows are a lap-top/Picasa thing, showing the hidden viewports?

The finished beast, not really 'finished' but I got enough detail into the breast-plate and toolboxes to con the casual observer, although I've just noticed the UCS is showing...doh!..Er...no...that's the new Dalek external temperature (red) air-speed (blue) and altitude (green) pitot, they're all having them fitted...now they can fly!

I am hoping to come back to it in a couple of months and attack the mid-section in 'Inventor' which may be a better tool for the sort of free-form shapes and intersecting arcs that make up the 'contours' of the shoulder area. But I am pleased enough with the final beastie to have bored you with it for the last couple of weeks! Back to toy soldiers....

LFA is for Low Flying Alien!

We always knew they could! Well...they did in the old movie didn't they, and one of the annuals! I finally got the chest/shoulder block and - specifically - the little plates of 'armour' to look half decent, it's still not finished, but after the best part of two weeks, it's looking good! It should be - it's given me several 'ice-cream' headaches and crashed the studio PC four times!

I need to do a lot of chamfering to the various shelves that run round the mid-section, but AutoCAD has decided not to let me do that now, nor will it let me put in fillets as a cheat, so now I know I can do it I may go back and do it again, after getting the chamfers done first.

I still need to sort out the chest piece, which still needs a couple of bolt-heads and a cut-out. At some point the two tool/weapons have come forward of their boxes "...while I wasn't looking your honour!" and will need to be pushed back, and the same boxes need little angled cut outs on the flat outer side, but otherwise well pleased with it and it's as far as I can go on this course really, so I need a job with a firm that will push me further...I can relocate?!!

T is for Tear Your Hair Out!

Instructions for drawing a Dalek in 3D using Autodesk's AutoCAD;

1.   Tear you hair out, it is far easier to do this at the start when you are still fresh and innocent of what is to come, than to do it at the inevitable point where all hope is lost and the dark walls of reality are closing-in.

2.   Go and find something to do that will bring greater reward and satisfaction in a shorter time period...this author suggests naked lion-wrestling.

3.   Er...that's it.

So, the head; I nearly continued "went together quite easily", but it took most of a week! To be fair, the neck/face grid/visor thing was surprisingly easy and I got that done in a day, but the rest was a shed-load of faffing about, and while it looks 'like' the totally fictional (and themselves differing from episode to episode or even individual to individual) mutated Kaled's, there have been various tweaks and compromises (for compromise read 'Feck-it! That'll do...it looks all right') to the point where it's really an approximation of an NSD.

The helmet and eye-stalk would make an excellent Sci-fi automated gun-turret/coastal artillery bunker thing, which had me and Tom placing naval gun-barrels in the slot to see what they'd look like...they look good! And (never start a sentence with 'and', yes Swan'y I know!) as it's a .dwg file it can be 3D printed pretty much 'as is', and could be scaled to any ratio with a couple of key-strokes.

Indeed, trying to find decent CAD files on-line (yes - to cheat!) I've discovered there aren't any really, there's a beautifully rendered black one somewhere and some nice construction drawings for home-builders to knock-up Daleks from plywood and resin...and bits of washing machine, but a dearth of CAD drawings, so if I get this finished I thought I might offer the files (there are several now, the original drawing got so code-heavy it kept crashing the PC...at three o'clock every day!) on a CD on FeeBay, I have no idea if it would sell, but discs of far more boring CAD-stuff do seem to sell so...?

Speaking of 'if I finish it'; note how I've cut the shoulders off in the screen-grab...I thought that if I could master the head, I could go back to the shoulders with the certainty of success; I had a second attempt this morning - I thought wrong...like I said; easier to tear you hair out at the start and find something safer to do...base-jumping from urban-semi's anyone?

D is for Doctor Doubts Definite Defeat of Dastardly Daleks - Drat, Drat and Double Drat!

Some of you may by now have got the impression I have a soft spot for Daleks...I DO! They're brilliant, totally impractical battle-armour for jellied humanoids who have become the antithesis of humanism, purified evil...I have been sent this classified document, stolen - at some risk to the agent - from the floor-manager Dalek's office in a survival suit factory on Skaros - he threw an old blanket over the manager's head! They're building Daleks again...

Joking apart, this is my attempt to produce a 3D 'Solids' Dalek, and it's doing my head in! I have now spent two days on the shoulders (the base and skirt were quite easy), and it's still not right, the head should go together quite well, it's just a series of stacked dishes with a mesh screen (that's real-world mesh not 3D 'Mesh'!) and a bowl!, but the shoulder is a series of non-circular roundy-shapes with a single mirror-symmetry front-to-back, and all the centre-points are off the 'centre-line' (such as there is one?).

The dark brown ones were my final attempt to get the indent that runs round the cone, and by the time I'd failed to get a workable shape from either of the subtracts I tried I realised I'd have to start again with the green one at the back, which means doing the weapon-boxes again, and they took me a long morning to get right last time!

And to any experienced CAD-monkeys out there...is there any trick to prevent the WCS turning into an unknown UCS, without you noticing because you've brushed a surface in passing? That is; other than throwing a brick at the screen!