Hobbies beside SketchUp

I’d like to learn how to do that.

I do have one small job to finish off. Should really go start that Stihl up again soon, and finish the job. Swamp Mahogany (Eucalyptus robusta) that came down in a storm recently. Trouble is my saw only has a 16" bar, which makes cutting up hard work. Need a portable mill for this baby…gets some nice slabs out of it.

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Hi RTCool. It’s pretty easy if you get set up right. You’ll need a decent tripod to get good coverage of the model from all angles if possible. Getting the right light conditions is the tricky part, esp. if your doing a 360° shoot and it’s a detail object & avoiding too much contrast from back skylight etc. Most phone cameras these days will work fine. Shiny or reflective / wet surfaces are hard, they don’t process well. I use Meshroom by Alicevision because it’s free, but I’ve trialed some of the other software that you can buy and they do work well, but you still need to get good images to begin with. Also need to recognize the camera in the software for best results. If you need any pointers / tips give us a yell. More than happy to help. Cheers.

Camera and lighting equipment I have. It’s the software I need to learn about, I guess.

Meshroom (AliceVision) is pretty straight forward to use. Just drag & drop your photos into it and it pretty much does the rest automatically. As long as your camera gets recognized at the start but it has a huge database of camera model for it. Also, it can be tricky if your security software wants to stop every program that it uses like mine, which means I have to approve about 8 .exe files before running it. Also helps if you’ve got a decent system, because it can take a couple of hours to run. I can help you out if you have an issues with it, maybe, not making any promises though…lol.

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Did you have to “green screen” the beagle?

Looks like that one is Windows or Linux only.

Wouldn’t know about iOS compatibility. Bummer :slightly_frowning_face:

Good question, but no. I’ve tried but don’t have any lights suitable for it. You need to keep the back screen some distance away from the model, otherwise the colour tends to reflect onto the model, which is not good. Also if model has multiple colours it won’t work in re: to removing background easily etc. And if you do it outside it doesn’t work because of the sunlight shining through the fabric which turns everything that colour a bit plus it will move in the wind which is bad. Can’t be shiny either, so cloth is good. I tend to do outside on an old wooden stool I have. Raw wood works well because of the grain etc. & can always keep with model as a base. Easy clean up any artifacts you get & just leave wood base. I tried setting up a backdrop but it was too hard and didn’t work anyway because it kept moving etc. The trick is to set your camera to manual, take some test shots to get the speed right for the light, then set the focal depth so it blurs the background a bit, then it shouldn’t pick up so much in processing, capturing mainly the model. Taking the photos is kind of tricky. When you get you SFM point cloud you can see where you’ve left gaps, and if you had a studio could just recapture those areas and add to the program to process. Meshroom is nodal / procedural so you can add, re-mesh/texture etc once you get the hang of it.

I’ve caught the birding photobug as well. Started with an Sony a6000, then a6500, now recently an a7r iii when Sony finally came with an e-mounted 600mm. (I got the 200-600mm, not the insane 600mm prime).

Haven’t used it much recently, partly because of lousy winter, partly due to being busy with other projects and partly because of the recent pandemic. But hoping to be able to dust of the camera equipment again soon now.

(Been toying with Flickr recently: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onionarmy/)

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I have a serious fishing tackle addiction! I make these in my basement:

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Oh, yes, I remember talking to you over cameras at 3D Basecamp. To travel light, all I brought with me was my little Lumix LX100.

About a year ago, I bought a new flagship camera (Nikon Z6) and mission critical ultra wide 14-30mm (for architectural interiors). I was left too financially injured to get the lens I’d like for birds. I settled for the time being on a bargain basement 70-300mm which becomes equivalent to 115-450mm on the D7100 body, and that’s what was used for all those shots in the earlier post.

Incredible how creative and talented our fellow forum contributors are and so many seem to have an interest! in woodwork in some form or another. I enjoy time in my woodwork shop and am about to make new timber tool chests/roller cabinets which I have promised myself for years. As the SU work has all but dried up at the moment now is the time. Dave - Here is my combination machine (Euro style) that I bought as a wreck and finally got it all set up & working perfectly- now to use it in earnest for the tool boxes.

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This is part of my Honey Doo/Model my home project 1st part completed.
The lower cabinet is completed, new faces fabricated here at home.
The upper is still in the design, preliminary fabrication phase.

@DaveR I couldn’t get a good texture on the rough-sawn stained wood, so I finally had a piece stained and used it for the texture. Had to make two textures on one on red axis and one on blue axis to make everything uniform. Edges get one texture and the Faces and ends the other.
Thanks for the help on that.

I have also been fabricating some cross picture frames for my wife, son and daughters but I will show those later. Interesting fabricating them out of old redwood molding. Wife and daughters are into the rustic look now.

Rough bathroom model.skp (1.8 MB) .

Here is the latest iteration of the wall cab with the correct hardware and hanging placement.M Bath Wall Cab.skp (831.5 KB)

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Looks pretty good.

That’s odd. You should have been able to manage that with one texture image with no problem.

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Pre-cat door, note the litter box, that is the second one. Our newest kept running my cat off of the litter, bad news. There is a second cat door on the other wall. It is hilarious watching the cats, all five of them, make circuits around before entering the liter box.

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It ran only a single direction so that it tiled on the short direction… Very noticeable and annoying. It could have to do with the way the axes are laid out on the different pieces. Didn’t push too far on it at this time.

Of course, I see it now.

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You can rotate the texture after you’ve placed it on the face so it runs the right way.

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