Grim up North Heath

Author: Fraser Steele

Caffeine! mug
A slight departure, this time I’ve designed a mug. I was thinking about what molecules would look good on a coffee mug and the obvious answer was ‘caffeine’.

Buy it on RedBubble!

One of the things I had planned to use Blender for was to make scientific models and diagrams as well as protein and molecular models. How to do these things was another matter and how to make anything of them when the market for scientific diagrams is (a) small and (b) a closed shop were further matters.

Having had the idea of caffeine-on-a-mug¹ I hit the University of YouTube and found out how to get from a molecule to a 3D design, and then from a 3D design to a cartoonised version. This latter was a design choice – I thought it would look bold and also it would be a way of cutting down on the number of colours required for the design.

I found a good tutorial by CG Figures who went through the two-step process to get from molecule name to a file that can be read by Blender.

I was already familiar with one of the websites that was recommended – molview.org – and the software to convert the SMILES file into a protein database (.pdb) file was easy enough to use. The SMILES format is a standardised way of representing organic molecules and it was the format I used to input molecules of interest into a molecular modelling tool to predict the pharmacokinetics of drugs – SwissADME is the website, if you’re interested.

Once I’d got the molecule model into Blender, there were a bunch of further steps to clean up the file into something that didn’t take up too much filespace and have extraneous faces that could give odd results when the image is finally rendered.

The caffeine molecule after some tweaking of the initial file. The software adds colours by default, in this case grey is carbon, blue is nitrogen, red is oxygen and white is hydrogen.

It didn’t take long to get to the point where I had a model that I could use as a basis for a design. Next, I wanted to turn it into a cartoon version. This means that the light and shade are demarcated by sharp lines with no fading.

In Blender there is a function called a “color ramp” which takes a colour or a shade and changes it. Using this I could control which parts of the atoms were darker and which had highlights. By moving the light around I could change where the light spots landed and also change the size of the highlights. And because the software sees the molecular model as a three dimensional object, the highlights vary around the model, making the model look more three dimensional, even though the idea is to create a two dimensional image.

Three cartoon monkey heads. Turning the head changes the cartoon lighting and adding grease pencil adds definition to the image.

In order to add a more cartoony look, a function called grease pencil can be used to add black lines to the scene. There are two ways to do this. Blender can add grease pencil automatically, which is what I’ve done here. You can also add it manually so that you can put details on the image.

Anyway, back to the caffeine image. Not only did I add the cartoon effect and grease pencil, but the molecule needed a caption so we know what it is.

Alternative fonts for the caption. I like the Bauhaus font (left) as a design choice, but the capital C is a bit too closed to read easily. Berlin font (right) has a similar vibe and a more open C.

Looking through font choices I tried Bauhaus – it’s bold and has a historic feel to it. After showing this to Mrs S, I changed to Berlin. She pointed out that the C in the Bauhaus font is a bit too closed, and the Berlin version looks better in this application.

As an alternative, there’s also the molecule on a mustard-coloured background and in German. I’ve yet to offer these alternatives in the shop, I don’t know how big the German market for nerdy science mugs is². I will likely keep the Bauhaus font for this, since the K looks echt cool, oder? I’ll need to use either Berlin or another font for the French (caféine), Spanish and Portuguese (cafeína) and Italian (caffeina) versions.

Two view of caffeine (Bauhaus font) and Koffein. Mustard yellow background or pinky purple? Which is better?

I can try other background colours, but I’m not sure what works best. Any suggestions are welcome.

The finished design could then be uploaded to Gelato so I could put that onto a mug and then get it published on Etsy.

Mock-up of the finished mug nestled in a bed of curly brown stuff.

Buy the mug on RedBubble!
1. It’s not an original idea. There are plenty of other places that sell this sort of thing, but I wanted to use a different style. ↩︎
2. Caffeine translates as ‘koffein’ Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, Swedish and Norwegian as well. ↩︎
16/06/2025
Blender part 9 – GameDev III
Orc painting!

Last time, I had made a nice looking orc¹.

The next stage was quite complex and not very visual for blogging purposes, except that the end result was obviously an image. It involved baking textures and it’s why we spent time on getting the musculature and the facial features right. It’s all to do with poly count.

The number of faces (polygons) in a model is an important factor in 3D modelling. The more faces you have, the better your model will look. The drawback is that these polygons take some time for the computer to calculate. This slows down your work and can result in the computer crashing.

By way of illustrating this, the face count for the model shown at the end of the last section and below was 14.5 million and a file size of 160 MB. By baking the textures onto a lower poly duplicate of the original, this comes down to 47,000 faces and a 64 MB file.

The unpainted orc on the left as 16 million polygons, the painted one on the right has 47,000 and more detail. The down side is that I can’t easily change anything about this model.

Baking is the process where details from a highly detailed model, such as shadows from clothes and weird veins and scars, get painted onto a lower poly mesh. The details aren’t there, but look like they are.

Baking textures allows you to use a low poly mesh that looks like a high poly mesh. The disadvantage is that you can’t change you mind about, for example, the position of the clothes once the bake is done. You can always repeat the bake, which takes a bit of time and isn’t very exciting.

Now that the rigging is in place, I can move the orc to give it an action pose. Might need to move the loincloth, it looks like it’s digging into the thigh.

In the end, I’m happy with how Steve turned out. There are a few mistakes with the painting, but if you can see them keep it to yourself. I should go back and re-do where I went wrong as an exercise.

So I had an orc with bones that I could manipulate and pose in a threatening manner. But the hands were wrong – the fingers looked awful when I tried to make them grab anything. That was the next thing, because I wanted to make Steve grab things and make a fist. That was for another time, though.

Two views of the orc’s right hand. The rigging allows you to move body parts and the controls for curling the fingers are simple enough. However, I did something wrong when I set the fingers up because the fingers don’t move properly.

So that was the course finished. Next up, I’ll have a look at getting realistic textures onto objects and then I’ll try and get those hands looking right so I can pose and animate Steve. And don’t forget to look for science-related opportunities for Blender.
1. You know what I mean. ↩︎
12/06/2025
Blender part 8 – GameDev II

Let the orc begin!

When I made Bob the non-demon (see below) I was introduced to sculpting in Blender. Virtual clay you manipulate with a mouse without having to consider gravity and then paint any colour you like offers huge opportunity for creativity.

After lighting and colouring, here’s Bob.

This promised to be a longer sculpt, since we were making not only a head, but a body and some rudimentary clothes – boots and a loincloth. I’ll split into three parts. Second part will look at the finishing of the sculpt, the third will look at some of the other stuff we can do with posable figures.

We used squashed spheres to block out the main shape of the head, body and hands. It’s the hands that proved the most tricky to get looking good. Later, the hands were to cause quite a lot of frustration when it came to rigging. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Progression of the orc sculpt. From blobs, to a bit of shape, to rough definition of muscles and hand. We only did one half because we can apply a mirror to the sculpt once we’d done fiddly stuff.

The body was the first part that got any proper attention. We added clay to the spheres and built up the main muscle groups. For much of the lessons I wasn’t sure what the end goal was, other than the final orc. So we spent some hours adding and refining the musculature, getting the boots right and sculpting a loincloth and belt shield.

Progress of the sculpt. The face was a detailed task, since we want to give the orc some personality. Then adding detail to the body muscles and then adding clothes to cover such bits as an orc feels it necessary to cover.

I’m not sure why, but I didn’t save any of the progress during the face sculpt; it followed a similar path to the work we did to create Bob, but adding tusks and shaping the mouth around them was different.

Next was to make the basic figure a bit more characterful. As with Bob, this involved adding asymmetry, scars and general wonkiness to the face. Further, this time we added ugly lumps and diseased parts to the orc. It was a shame to do this, I’d spent some time getting the musculature of the shoulders right and they were covered by the shoulder plate and the hideous growth that I added.

To make the orc a bit more interesting and to seem like he’d had a bit of a life, we added unsightly lumps and a horrible growth to his left shoulder. That’s what happens when you mess with wizards.

Raised veins were added using a texture brush – basically paint on a texture and it makes whatever shape is on the brush. I’d need to go back and be reminded how to do that again.

As part of the messification of the sculpt, we had added some detail to the belt boss and bashed the metal bits around because this orc has seen action.

It was about here that I showed the sculpt to our daughter, who named him ‘Steve’.

So I had an orc ready to colour in and use to learn about animating characters. But that’s for next time.

05/06/2025
Chicken and chorizo meatballs
Oven cooked meatballs! Remember to use a big pan for the tomato sauce or the meatballs won’t fit in.

Feeds four.

Timings: Prep: 20 min. Cooking: 40 min Eat: 10 min

Ingredients

500 g chicken mince

100 g breadcrumbs

A good pinch of salt

One egg

100g chorizo

A can of tomatoes

Onion and garlic

Vegetable stock cube/ stock pot

About a teaspoon each of dried oregano, thyme and chilli flakes. Add other herbs to your liking, and black pepper.

2 tablespoons oil (peanut, vegetable or whatever is to hand)

Pasta – about 75 g dry weight per person.

You’ll need two big saucepans and a baking tray. Oven to 180 C (fan), gas mark 6.

If you can’t get chicken mince, use a blender to mash up the required amount of chicken thighs¹. Use the same blender to shred the chorizo (and make the breadcrumbs, unless you want to buy them).

Breadcrumbs and shredded chorizo in a Minimixer.

Combine the mince, chorizo, breadcrumbs, egg, salt, herbs and spices in a bowl and mix well. You can do away with the egg if you add more salt or leave the mix for longer – overnight is best². Form into 12 or so meatballs. Smaller ones will cook quicker, you might make 20.

Meatball mix. The salt and egg help to bind the meatballs.

Distribute the raw meatballs onto a baking tray with an oiled baking sheet. Brush with a little oil and bake for 20 minutes until browned – check they are done with a meat thermometer if you have one.

Ready to cook, raw meatballs on an oiled, foiled baking tray. The oil helps brown the meatballs and lessen sticking to the foil.

While the meatballs are in the oven, make the tomato sauce. It would be an option to make this earlier – a couple of hours earlier – since the flavour improves with time. Depends on how busy you are.

Fry chopped onion at a low heat for at least 5 minutes until they are translucent. If you have time, fry at a very low heat for even longer until they caramelise. Add garlic, spices and dried herbs, fry for another minute.

Add the tin of tomatoes, rinse out with half a can of water and add this to the sauce. Add the stock cube/ stock pot and simmer.

Boil the pasta as directed on the packet. It’s a good idea to time it so that the pasta is done about five minutes after the meatballs are come out of the oven.

Meatballs after 20 minutes in the oven. A bit of browning adds flavour. An yes, OK, they did stick to the foil a bit.

Once the meatballs are cooked, transfer them into the pan with the sauce. This is why you need a big saucepan and I never made the mistake of using a small saucepan. Oh no, siree, matey Bob!

Meatballs in tomato sauce, ready to dish up.

Garlic bread goes well with this.
1. Chicken thigh are tastier than breast, but not as aesthetically pleasing. ↩︎
2. I think I got this tip from Gordon Ramsey. The salt breaks down some of the protein in the meat and helps the mixture bind by creating a natural glue. ↩︎
04/06/2025
Taskmaster scoring
How important is it, really?

Taskmaster scoreboard from Season 13, Episode 1. Chris Ramsey – the person who enjoyed the experience the most of any contestant – set an early lead.

A recent publication by David Silver¹ discusses the scoring in Taskmaster and how this impacts on the enjoyment of the series. It also looks at other metrics, such as the use of Large Language Model (LLM, a sort-of primitive AI) to analyse the script and detect sarcasm, among other things².

The Abstract was enough for me to be sceptical about the study. Of all the metrics that were applied, the one that Little Alex Horne thinks is the most important was missed (from the abstract). It is the mix of people that’s the crucial element. I’ll come onto Silver’s treatment of that later.

What struck me was that if you wanted to know why we enjoy the show, a survey would do the trick. From what I’ve seen on the Taskmaster subreddit, most people see the scores as one of the many parts of the show. If anyone wants to win too much, it can be bad – John Robins strayed close to the ‘too needy’ zone. If they don’t care and do well (Jo Brand, Sarah Millican³, Sam Campbell⁴) that’s even better.

Sometimes you get the joy of a contestant such as Julian Clarey, who clearly didn’t care until towards the end. There was more sitting forward in his seat as scores were given out in the later episodes. He lost by a few points, sacrificing the win for a gloriously calm meltdown in the road-sweeper task.

The main attraction for winning is likely to be the chance to do it all again in Champion of Champions.

Dara O Briain, the winner of the third Champion of Champions with the Little Alex Horne puppet and his very convincing wig.

Whose win is it anyway?

Contestants are comedians (or comedy-adjacent) and they have different ideas about what winning is. Getting a laugh is the win and it’s this instant, honest feedback that many of them crave. That, and being paid on time.

Desiree Burch epitomises this attitude. There was a balloon-popping task in Series 12. She knew that the ‘correct’ way to do the task was to get the scissors, cut the string and release the portcullis. But she also knew the funny thing was to throw pebbles, rubber ducks, a bucket-load of forks and eventually the bucket itself at the balloon until finally taking the scissors.

Desiree Burch cementing herself as a contestant who understood the brief.

Who? Who?

So we come back to what I think is the most important of the many factors in Taskmaster – the cast and the cast mix.

I’ve usually known a couple of the contestants, but then I’m a fan of comedy⁵. These tend to be well-established figures from stand-up (Dara Ó Briain, Mel Giedroyc, Sue Perkins) or related areas (Charlotte Ritchie, Steve Pemberton, Lisa Tarbuck). Add in some that I am not familiar with (Fern Brady⁶, Rose Matafeo), some I might have seen a couple of times on other things (Rosie Jones, John Kearns, Katie Wix) plus unknowns and we have a cast.

Eventually I get to know them all and their interaction is a major factor in the enjoyment. Seeing how the different minds complete the set-up that LAH has written is the principal draw, that is the meat of the sandwich.

In Silver’s paper he assigns five ‘types’ to the contestants based on how well they do points-wise, and then tries to fit each contestant in each season into these types. He tries to force his five types into every cast, like Cinderella’s sisters trying to force their feet into the glass slipper.

Assigning character types may be a better approach, but it gets very complex and I’m not a fan of assigning personality types⁷. There may be ten (or a different number) character traits that are needed in a cast, where each panellist has two or more components. Jack Dee is surly and competent. Julian Clary is sarcastic and insouciant. Kerry Godliman and Lisa Tarbuck were both straightforward ‘Bosh!’ merchants, but Godliman was competitive and Turbuck was laid back.

A moment of unalloyed joy for Kerry and Greg.

It’s a parody, innit?

The main reason for the points is that the show is a parody of competition. In his book ‘Be Funny or Die’, Joel Morris points out that a good parody has to look and feel like the thing it’s parodying. Spinal Tap only works because the music is professional quality and it looks like a documentary⁸. Airplane! works so well because there is a real aeroplane disaster plot thrumming away in the background and the cast play this straight. We follow the events of Galaxy Quest because the Thermians are facing extinction at the hands of the genocidal Sarris and their only hope is a bunch of shop-soiled actors.

There are points scored, so the show behaves like a panel show, the rhythms and beats are there to hang the chaos on. How the panellist behave is another matter and this is where the joy truly lies.
1. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.02886
  ↩︎
2. Artificial intelligence is really good at detecting sarcasm. ↩︎
3. Who would have walked away with the win in any other series (except maybe John Robins’), all the while not really caring. ↩︎
4. Sam won the most heart-warming series, with the two Sues forming an eternal friendship over a packet of NikNaks. ↩︎
5. That term suggests that there are people who don’t like comedy. I think the phrase in this case means people who go out of their way to find out about comedy and comedians, and go so far as to occasionally blog about comedy. ↩︎
6. Me Fern Brady! Me Fern Brady! I’m the rightful queen! ↩︎
7. Maybe there are people who are fans and I should be designing Myers-Briggs t-shirts for my shop. ↩︎
8. The, if you will, ‘rockumentary’. ↩︎
22/05/2025
Blender part 7 – Gamedev I
This is another paid-for course, again with Grant Abbitt as the tutor. This took me a while to complete, there was a lot to learn. But, again, Grant took us through everything and explained why things were being done. I got the course through Gamedev.tv, there are quite few other courses to look at, mainly for game design.

First we learned how to add shapes (mainly blocks) to a scene and add textures to the blocks. This is the sort of thing that familiarises the user with the setup of Blender and how to change things. It’s also useful if you’ve already done a course covering these things but forget quite easily.

Secondly, we made a ‘mech’. This was a stylised all-terrain mobile gun and sort of a cross between ED 209 from Robocop and the two-legged transports in Star Wars.

A comparison of the two-legged all terrain walker from Star Wars (left) and ED 209, the enforcement droid from Robocop. The mech we designed is inspired by these machines.

The build was an exercise in hard-body modelling, one of the things I wanted to learn so that I could design things for 3D printing. Hard-body modelling is one of those things that you learn by doing. This became apparent as Grant guided us through the build and showed how to get from a cube to the cockpit by cutting and shaping in a particular order.

A chassis and legs came next, then the guns.

How the mech was assembled. The cockpit came first, then the chassis and legs, and finally the guns

It’s a very angular look, this is done on purpose to achieve a ‘low poly’ aesthetic. The number of polygons (individual faces) affects how quickly a computer running a game can operate. You want the computer to be able to present good gameplay without a fiddly, highly detailed object slowing the computer down. The ‘low poly well’ I made earlier in this series is another example of this idea.

A low poly well made using as few ‘faces’ as possible to get a nice-looking but quick to render object.

The artistic side is the painting. We can add colours and textures to any ‘face’ in the model, so that the guns have a range of colours and glowing parts and there’s a green glow around the windscreen.

Completed mech with colouring and glowing guns. The green glow around the windscreen is a classy touch.

Setting the scene is another arty part and it’s best to get it right to show off the work. I changed the colours, because the sort-of camouflage was a bit dull, so I thought some vibrant colours would work well¹.

An alternative to the original mech, this one is pink and yellow and standing in a spotlight.

Finally, I made a more fabulous version, with glitter (which took a while to learn how to do). I added a camera circle so that the true magnificence of the final design can be appreciated.

Fly-round of the glittery mech.

The next parts of the course leads up to sculpting, colouring and animating an orc. This took a few weeks to complete, I’ll post the progress in a couple of separate posts.

Grant Abbitt, the tutor for the course I’m doing, and the orc that we will spend the next few weeks sculpting.
1. Work well for image purposes. Maybe not so well on a battlefield. ↩︎
21/05/2025
Vintage Patent T-Shirts for Cycling Fans
New t-shirt design!

This is the latest in the series of Patent-inspired t-shirts.

Blue print on white

White print on black

I want to ride my bicycle

I want to ride my bike

I want to ride my bicycle

I want to ride it where I like

I’ve not ridden a bike for over 30 years (last one was stolen in 1993) so I’ve missed out on a lot of the developments in bicycle technology. I do enjoy watching the Tour de France, though, and one thing I was well aware of is the use of derailleur gears – they’ve been around since before I was born.

I was maybe 13 when I got my first multi-gear (10 speed, as I recall) bike after I’d outgrown the 3-speed one I got when I was 8¹. We’d moved to England by then, and where we lived wasn’t very hilly but also not so busy that I was in danger when out on the roads.

The rear wheel of a bike is probably not considered much by non-riders. It’s the wheel that turns when you turn the pedals. But the mechanism that controls the gears is the subject of much debate and engineering over the years.

Rear gear bit of a bike. The derailleur is the black Z-shaped thing which controls the chain as it hops between the spoke wheels on the axle and also maintains chain tension as the gear size changes.

Back in the old days (very old days) bikes didn’t have gears. The penny-farthing had a huge wheel and, if you found the hill was too steep, you hopped off and pushed.

Variable gearing initially involved having two gear spokes on either side of the back wheel and then getting off and turning your wheel around to go uphill (or downhill). I don’t know if there’s any footage of Tour de France competitors doing this, but your skills in fixing a bike were at least as important as your riding ability².

The derailleur is a remarkably old invention, with the first rod-based systems being invented in the late 19th century. There is a book on this called ‘The Dancing Chain’ by Frank Berto, but it’s at least £75 and I’m not that into cycling.

Never an organisation to rush into making things easy for competitors, the Tour de France resisted such new-fangled innovations for many decades. Finally, in 1937, competitors in the Tour were allowed to use derailleur gearing. The effect this had on the average speed of the cyclists was minimal – an increase from 31.1 kph to 31.8 kph was about average for the speed year-on-year speed increase at the time (BikeRaceInfo.com).

Shimano gears

Founded in 1921 by Shozaburo Shimano, Shimano is one of the watch-words in the bike community. Their gears and groupsets (gears, gear changers, etc) are regarded as the best by many riders.

Pro teams currently using Shimano gears include fourteen of the eighteen UCI men’s World Tour (the top ranking pro teams) and four of the fifteen UCI Women’s World Tour teams.

So in honour of this, I researched the early stages of derailleur gears and found the 1970 patent co-authored by Shozaburo’s son, Keizo Shimano. I think this was the basis of the Dura-Ace gear set that remained popular for a couple of decades.

Shimano derailleur gearing patent, blue on a white t-shirt.

The patent design is now available as blue on white or white on blue or black in my RedBubble³ shop.

Blue printing

White printing

Disraeli Gears

As I said at the top derailleurs have been around since before I was born. Indeed, Cream’s 1967 album Disraeli Gears was so called when one of the group’s roadies dropped this malapropism when he heard that Eric Clapton was buying a racing bike.

Let’s listen to one of their songs from that album.
1. This had hub gears, which I never worked out the mechanism for, there’s just a chain that disappears into the axle. It’s probably magic. ↩︎
2. The spirit of the individual cyclist riding the Tour is typified by the story of Eugène Christophe from the 1913 Tour. He was leading by 18 minutes and descending the Tourmalet when his front forks broke. It took him two hours to reach the village at the foot of the mountain. He found a blacksmith who would let him use his forge – the rules stated he had to make repairs alone – and, after three more hours he set off with a mended bike. Race officials gave him a 10 minute penalty because a local boy pumped the bellows of the forge for him.
  He eventually finished seventh overall. ↩︎
3. I gave up on Etsy, the shop is too fiddly for the type of goods I want to sell and having to front up 20p per item for three months on the shop started to get a bit too much. I’ll keep it open though, since I may want to sell individually made items in the future. ↩︎
17/05/2025
Thai Green Curry

An easy favourite. Feeds 3.

Timings: Prep: 10 min. Cooking: 10 min Eat: 10 min

Ingredients

Two large chicken breasts (or three small ones)

Mangetout – about 100 g

Green curry paste, 40 or 50 g (I used Mea Ploy brand for this one)

A can of coconut milk (400 ml)

Jasmine rice (200 g uncooked rice is enough for three)

2 tablespoons oil (peanut, vegetable or whatever is to hand)

You’ll need a big saucepan and a large frying pan.

Slice the chicken breasts. I prefer slices to chunks for this recipe, but you do whatever you like best.

Rinse the rice. Boil about 600 ml water in a large saucepan (more water is fine), add salt and boil the rice while you cook the chicken. The rice will take about 10 minutes to cook.

Fry the green curry paste in the oil. If you’ve bought a one-meal batch of paste, use it all. The paste I’ve been using (see picture below) says to use 50 g. This was at the top end of our tolerance for spicy heat, so I’ve used 40 g since the first time. This makes a curry that’s hot enough to enjoy without feeling challenged.

This is the green curry paste I’ve been using. It’s spicy enough for us without added chilis, as the serving suggestion shows. This pot cost about £3, it’s good for eight to ten meals. Bargain!

Fry for a minute, then add some of the cream from the coconut milk. To make this easier I store the can of milk upside down so that there is a plug of cream when you open the can.

Once the paste and cream are combined and smelling good, add the sliced chicken. Fry until the chicken has gone white on the outside, then add the rest of the can. If you don’t want too much sauce, don’t add all the coconut water from the can.

Stir while cooking and remember to keep an eye on the rice.

About two minutes before the rice is done, add the mangetout. It’ll want a couple of minutes cooking to get warm, but don’t leave it too long or it’ll go soft.

Chicken curry nearly ready for dishing up. Just give the mangetout a minute or two in the sauce. That’s enough to warm it through without losing the crunch.

I crushed a few almonds to add on top – peanuts or any other nut will do, but we had almonds in the pantry.

Once the rice is done, strain in a sieve. If it’s a bit claggy for your liking, rinse with boiling hot water before serving.

Dinner’s ready! Thai green curry with jasmine rice. Some crushed almonds add a crunch.

There’s usually quite a lot of sauce. Make sure there’s enough rice to soak it all up.

We usually have ‘Thai inspired crackers’ with this. Last time, it was a Tesco own brand bag, I don’t think we’ve ever stretched to Sharwood’s own brand. Same with the coconut milk – it’s usually supermarket own brand.

I keep meaning to look into how to make my own green curry paste. I don’t know what the minimum amount is that can be made or how well it keeps. I don’t want to make a kilo of paste and it all go to waste.

06/05/2025
Blender – playing with light
Having finished the course on Udemy I had a look round for the next thing to have a go at. In the mean time I’ve done a few more tutorials from YouTube and been mostly pleased with the results.

A minor issue with the videos is that the Blender software has been updated many time over the years and some features have moved, so I do hit a wall occasionally.

Luckily, the internet is full of advice and there is always someone who has had the same problem.

One such issue has centred on Rendering. This is the process of getting from the grey blobs and lines, to coloured images and finally to a .png file or a usable animation.

This is a collection of objects rendered using EEVEE. The results are fine, and the image is produced quickly.

This is a collection of objects rendered using Cycles. The results are much better than with EEVEE, especially with the transparent materials. This does take longer to produce an image, though.

If you look at the glass doughnut in the two images, you can see why cycles is preferred for end results. The light from the yellow pyramid has been diffracted in a realistic way in the Cycles render, but EEVEE doesn’t do as good a job. You can fiddle with the settings to improve matters, but I will leave that for the future.

The EEVEE render engine (Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine) is the fast renderer in Blender. It acts as a game engine, so it produces good quality images for the purposes of quickly seeing what you have made.

For better visuals, you need Cycles, which takes more time to come up with the goods because it cycles through the image properties to perform ray-tracing. This is where the paths of the lights are calculated so that, as in the images above, the light from the yellow cone is refracted in a more realistic way through the glass torus. Reflections also look better in Cycles.

Fiddling with the settings of the glass will give better results, for example changing the index of refraction (IoR) of the glass will change how the light interacts with the material. I did this for the spinning beer mug, stills are shown below. One has a glass edge (IoR = 1.45), the other has a diamond edge (IoR = 2.5).

Light behaves very differently when the surround is given the index of refraction of glass (left) and diamond (right).

You can also use a change in IoR to make different lenses. Since we aren’t concerned with reality there is the potential to make a lens with a IoR of less than 1. Such a thing is not possible (at the moment for visible light¹), but since Blender computes light rays we can have fantasy physics.

Changing the refractive index of the surround to the beer mug does odd things to how it looks. The position of the highlights changes, as does the brightness of the reflections. You can go further and change the index of refraction for each wavelength of light.

So I made two lenses, both biconvex like the lens of the eye. In the picture below, the one on the left has an IoR of 0.8, the one on the right’s IoR is 1.45 (glass).

Demonstration of the effect of refractive index on lens behaviour. Both lenses are biconvex, but the one on the left has a refractive index of 0.8 (impossible (at the moment)), the one on the right simulates glass and magnifies the block behind it.

I’m not sure what application this will have in 3D modelling, but it is interesting to muck around with what’s possible.
1. This has been done for microwaves using metamaterials, but that’s not relevant to what I’m talking about here. ↩︎
05/05/2025
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
His most satisfying novel is now a Penguin Modern Classic

As long-term fans of Terry Pratchett (see previous post), the publication of his 29th Discworld novel “for adults of all ages”, Night Watch, was eagerly anticipated in the Steele household. It was published in 2002, a year of changes for us. I finished my PhD that year and secured a placement at Monash University as a post-doc researcher in the Victorian College of Pharmacy¹. Mrs S had been headhunted by a mortgage company late in the year, but had to turn it down to move to Australia. We also had our kitchen re-done that year. We completed the work the day before we left the country.

By the time Night Watch was released we had got into the habit of buying the hardbacks for each other on birthdays and Christmases. If Mrs S bought one for me she would be impatiently waiting for me to finish. I’m a slow reader.

All the little angels rise up, rise up…

Twenty-three years down the line I’ve no idea who bought who our copy. But from the first line, we knew it was a good ‘un.

Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but finished shaving before he did anything about it.

After a brief interview with an apprentice assassin who’s fallen into a cesspit (the source of the scream), flowering lilac reminds Sam of the date – 25th May – the day when the Republic of Treacle Mine Road is commemorated. It went out of his head, what with his wife, Lady Sybil, due to give birth any time soon.

We get reacquainted with The Watch in this, the sixth novel in the sub-series. The fortunes of the watch have improved beyond recognition since “Guards! Guards!”². We meet the main players at a graveyard where they privately remember the fallen of the Glorious 25th May. One of the gravestones bears the name ‘John Keel’, which sits among five other graves (one of which is normally empty, but Reg Shoe, now a zombie and officer of The Watch, buries himself in solidarity with the other fallen).

But official remembrance of the fallen has to wait. A serial cop-killer, Carcer Dun, has been spotted. A rooftop chase ends by the library of the Unseen University, the most concentrated region of magic in the Discworld. Lightning strikes Vimes and Carcer, sending them back in time 30 years.

Faced with being unknown and out of time, Vimes adopts the identity of John Keel, the sergeant who trained Vimes as a young watchman. The real Keel has been murdered by Carcer, the first change to the timeline and an event that the History Monk Lu-Tze³ spends the novel trying to rectify. Carcer, having falling in with pre-Guild thieves, is soon established as a sergeant in the city’s secret police, the Cable Street Particulars (aka The Unmentionables).

What follows is a mix of social commentary, Les Misérables, philosophical musings on what to do if you meet your younger self (other than be shocked at what a twerp you were), fun with an ox and a piece of ginger, a new spin on the expression ‘Look after yourself’, and, finally, the way home.

How do they rise up, rise up?

This isn’t his funniest book. That’s a toss up between Witches Abroad and Last Continent⁴. Too much humour would have been out of place in a book where political corruption culminates in the assassination of the city Patrician, where we witness the intense loneliness of Sam in his home city but 30 years away from his current life, and where a torture chamber is unearthed that makes watchmen vomit.

We also get a timely reminder of an earlier Pratchett aphorism that it’s not only the cream that rises to the top in society.

But there is gallows humour and the sort of social observation we love in Pratchett’s work. The use of old ladies as psychological warfare, the topology of a revolutionary state (if there’s more of the city inside our barricades than outside, that makes us the majority) and how seamstresses differ from needlewomen.

They rise up arse up, arse up high!

Eleven years after his death and just after what would have been his 77th birthday, Night Watch has been published as a Penguin Modern Classic. As such, it joins the ranks of Brideshead Revisited, The IPCRESS File and Nineteen Eighty Four.

This new edition has a new cover – rather than Paul Kidby’s pastiche of Rembrandt’s Night Watch⁵, we get a black and white version of the original. This is a rare example of the cover art determining the title. The working title was “The Nature of the Beast”, but when Kidby visited Pratchett and showed him the painting (Kidby’s first for the series), Terry changed the title to reflect this wonderful artwork.

Comparison of the original Paul Kidby cover (left) and the cover for the Penguin Modern Classic edition of Night Watch. Kidby’s original features characters from the book, including Sam Vimes, Sam Vimes, Nobby, Lu-Tze, Havelock Vetinari and Reg Shoe (pre-zombie).

The cynical part of me suggests that this cover art is more fitting for serious readers to be seen with. It must be a proper book because it has a black and white image on the cover. Either that or a bold abstract design, because one can’t be seen reading fantasy, can one?

The new edition has notes and annotations to contextualise the novel. I’ve not seen a copy yet, but the authors of the notes are known Pratchett fans. One even nominated Terry for an honorary doctorate at the University of Dublin.

I don’t know how many new Pratchett readers this new edition with generate. It is a rare author who can blend satire, fantasy and properly good jokes. And despite – or perhaps because – Sir Terry was, for a time, the best selling author in the UK, there is still an element of sneering at fantasy and science fiction from some quarters, especially when it’s funny. It may be that Pratchett is seen as putting a hat on a hat – he should have written fantasy, or comedy, not both.

I don’t really care. I’ve never been personally mocked or attacked for reading Pratchett, and it’s likely that I would never have got to know Mrs S were I not a fan. All praise to the Republic of Treacle Mine Road!

The motto of the Republic of Treacle Mine Road: Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love and a Hard-Boiled Egg.
1. ‘Victorian’ as in the Australian state Victoria. Not ‘Victorian’ as in men in tweeds with handlebar moustaches riding penny-farthings. Though that remains the image I have in my mind whenever I hear the phrase ‘Victorian Police’. ↩︎
2. This includes the presence of the troll Detritus, who we first met in “Guards! Guards!” working as a splatter (“like a bouncer, but trolls use more force.”) then in “Moving Pictures” as hired muscle. His transformation from animate rock to respected Sergeant in the City Watch is the most remarkable character growth in the series. He’s truly a renaissance troll. ↩︎
3. Six thousand year old monk, practitioner of déjà fu, devotee of The Way of Mrs Cosmopolite. He was a main character in Thief of Time; first seen in Small Gods. ↩︎
4. Inevitably, this is a personal opinion and subject to change depending on how recently I’ve read them and which bits Mrs S and I have quoted to each other. ↩︎
5. Officially, the painting is called The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but that’s much harder to fit on the cover of a novel. ↩︎
04/05/2025