Lau's Life

I am in love! with begonias. I don't know what exactly made me fall so deep and hard for this lovely foliage plant. It has been around for a long time and I may have come across it but never did I give it a second glance. Until recently when my dear neighbour gave me some of her collection and I was smitten. I've been foraging the local nursery and also the Sunday market for this plant. I've manage to collect a few more additions to my small collection. Some were not for sell but I manage to convince the owner that I'll will take full responsibility for their personal well being. And if you notice, my begonias are not bushy or vibrant. Well, that's because I took just a tiny stem cutting as not to overstepped the owner generosity. We must not be demanding when we are asking someone's else favour. Anyway, this is my list of begonias that I have. I do try to find out their names as I think it  is important to know it in general. And no, I don't call them by name when I greet them in the morning. Here goes........

Happy Birthday! I know it's a bit late but better late than never. I wont mention name , age and gender(opps, I just say sis right?) but you know which one of you I'm wishing to. The next two months, I'll be celebrating birthdays one after another. Since we are far apart, I'll just do a little animation to celebrate your birthday. Now I know that it is not perfect. I just notice that the string didn't moved in coherent with the balloons. I did hooked the rope mesh to the balloons, but in all likelihood when I make the UV Spheres into a soft body, it cancel out the hook. And the balloons are a bit too glossy. I have lowered it to 0.5 but it took too long to render (my notebook is official at the lower end, unless there still some pentium 1 around) and a bit too fast. I should slow down the movement to 0.2. I applied soft body to the balloons and put the stiffness to nearly 1 and dampening to zero. You can still see that the body are a bit deformed when colliding with each other. And there was no grass particles. Instead, I use a grass pictures and set it to textures with the geometry normal set at -1. And the sky is actually a plane that I have moved the location. The text are mirrored and there is a black plane behind the camera to give a darker text. I also added a wind force fill to moved the balloons around. I decided not to use the node editor because again, my notebook is a bit outdated. By the way, I'm using blender 2.59 instead of 2.60a since the latter crash too often for my liking.

Yea!!! I'm finally here. I have started my first blog. I know, it is so last century and people don't blog a lot any more compare to Facebook and Twitter. I'm a bit slow on jumping on the bandwagon but hey, I'm here, finally. And what shall I write about? I'm not trying to be totally unique and have 'one of a kind' blog. Neither am I trying to have 3 billion followers (now that would be a scary thought). I am definitely not going to have the knowing all kind of blog. That is just not me. So what will I write about since I'm not all of the above? I am going to be writing about what makes me want to live another day. My passion for life's little pleasure. What I love doing. It's going to be a mixture of gardening, 3D animation, cooking, traveling....... I think that's it. Not too much. I'm not that gifted anyway. I am going to write about the journey,the triumph as well as the failure in my little ventures. That's life, you win some and you lose some. And to me, the journey is definitely more important than the destination. So let the journey, begins....