technonaturalist

image link to hive image link to ko-fi

August Homeschooling Miscellany

Friday, 21 October 2016 @ 3:44pm
Kids making birthday cards

There were a couple of birthdays this month which of course meant birthday cards had to be made.

9yo with baby cousin

We welcomed a new baby cousin.

Peg sculpture

And spent a fair bit of time with my parents who were visiting. 11yo made a peg sculpture.

3D Coat/Blender notes: Getting ptex textures from 3d Coat to Blender

Wednesday, 12 October 2016 @ 8:47pm

tl;dr: bake the damn things.

After painting, from the paint room go to Textures > Texture Baking Tool

3d Coat Texture Baking Tool menu item

Fill in the stuff on the dialogue box as appropriate (I have no idea how correct my settings are, I tend to take a best guess with anything I don’t know :P)

3d coat texture baking dialogue

Export the model as a .dae, import into Blender. It seems to import as many Ptex materials as layers you used in the 3d Coat’s paint room. I used two layers for the vaporeon model (one for colour, one for displacement). Set the materials up to use nodes and add their files (which will be named to go with each layer, e.g. anything with PtexPlane0 in the name in my case corresponds to PtexMtl0 in the material list).

July Homeschooling Miscellany

Tuesday, 11 October 2016 @ 9:03pm

Right at the beginning of July we went to Melbourne for 4 days to visit my 97yo grandmother. While we were there we also went to check out the city and Mum decided that we may as well go and have our first snow experience seeing as we were there in winter, and generously paid for a private tour.

On the first day we decided to go and check out the Melbourne Museum, as the kids love museums. The train took forever as there were a million stops and by the time we got there the kids were starving to death so the first thing we did was run off to look for food. We ate at a lovely Italian restaurant, and then found out that we went in the opposite direction of the museum. After a quick glance around we discovered there was a Chinese museum down the alleyway between the building the Italian restaurant was in and the next one over. After assuring 7yo that we would not get mugged walking down this alleyway (it was quite literally a gap between two buildings, not even any room for skips or fire escapes), we walked down the alleyway into the tiny little Chinatown which seemed primarily designed to house The Chinese Museum.

June Homeschooling Miscellany

Sunday, 24 July 2016 @ 12:18pm

As it turned out the other 7yo’s pre-soaked pea (near the green stick) hadn’t “drownded”, it had just been taking its sweet time sprouting.

Sprouting pea plants in pot

He’s been doing a pretty good job of remembering to water them every few days with little to no prompting/reminding. He also decided to do some of his iPad work with an added challenge, while “disguised” in the box he’d cut holes in to make a robot/box troll/etc kind of outfit for himself.

May Homeschooling Miscellany

Sunday, 17 July 2016 @ 9:57am
11yo's drawing of Sans from Undertale on the whiteboard

11yo’s drawing of Sans from Undertale on the whiteboard

J and 7yo playing Shadows Over Camelot

JJ and 7yo playing Shadows Over Camelot. 11yo and 9yo are off frame waiting for their turn. I’m obviously taking the photo. The game is fun and a little bit involved and is cooperative rather than competitive (unless someone turns out to be the traitor!).

April Homeschooling Miscellany

Thursday, 23 June 2016 @ 10:39pm

Artificial rock climbing at the PCYC fundraiser. Didn’t get a lot of photos as we got rained out!

11yo went to a birthday party for one of his team mates and won a dancing competition not because he’s any good at dancing but because he was full of confidence and energetically went at it where a lot of his friends were too scared to even get on the floor.

Works in progress

Thursday, 23 June 2016 @ 6:25pm

Because I’m failing at making proper progblogs due to having to slog through a massive backlog (which now has a severe dent in it, unfortunately I think I also made a dent in myself XD).

Chimaera retopo

Retopology of a chimaera in 3d Coat which I will rig in Blender and then draw over

Ingress wallpaper wip

Ingress character wallpaper being worked on in Krita

Wacom Cintiq Companion Hybrid/13HD and associated app settings on Ubuntu Studio 16.04LTS

Sunday, 5 June 2016 @ 3:15pm

Downloading all the things

Add the repository for Gnome Pie Menu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:simonschneegans/testing 
sudo apt-get update

Download helper utilities:

sudo apt-get install easystroke wmctrl xdotool gnome-pie

Download apps:

3d Coat is a proprietary product. Ubuntu Studio ships with a version of Blender and Krita but they lag at least a version behind. The shipped versions may well do the job (and be easier to upgrade) unless you specifically need something in a newer version or just like being on the latest version of everything. I stashed all of these in /usr/local as that’s on its own partition on the ssd. My home directory is on a 2Tb not-ssd. I don’t know if that’s “right and proper” for Linux but everything works, I know where it is and it theoretically shouldn’t get hosed if Ubuntu explodes and requires a complete reinstall so I don’t care.

March Homeschooling Miscellany

Friday, 20 May 2016 @ 1:56pm

7yo got one of those hatching dinosaur eggs for his birthday.

The fully “grown” thing is now sitting on his shelf with all his other dinosaurs.

Octopus musings

Thursday, 5 May 2016 @ 9:04pm

7yo: do you know how an octopus would open a nut?
JJ: how?
7yo: the same way it opens a clam. AND YOUR SKULL.