It would make sense to upload it to Rapidshare or similar rather than as an SCF attachment and save the link in the first post embedded in the words

"DOWNLOAD HERE" in BIG letters!

Excellent!

Mmmmm....braai'd boerewors with a little All Gold tomatie sous!

I use Photobucket for that when I need to, but it's a pain having to open another site, sign in, upload and copy in links!

Jon/Linea- how did you fix your attachment?

Hijack alert:

I've been meaning to ask for ages- how come I see other people posting big attachments all the time, but when I try to attach anything larger than about 500 x 300 px it gets stuffed into a bloody scoll window?

Dylan,

Your suggestion is a good way to fake shadows (presumably you're going to create a new layer using a mask from the SU shadows?), or (using the same selection) you could try creating a new layer from the background layer and then adjust the lightness, Exposure and/or Gamma of the shadow layer.

Hi Dylan,

You can try selecting the colour of the tree foliage, then using "color range" (in the "Select" menu) you'll be able to select just the foliage, add the trunk to he selection using the polygonal lasso tool, then copy that selection as a new layer over your canopy. It'll take a bit of playing with the colour range parameter (I think you'll need very high for this), but should work.

Alternatively duplicate the whole bacground layer and use the reverse of the above process to select colours that aren't in the tree foliage, then erase everything but the tree.

Holy sh*t guys, play nice! I'm certainly not taking sides, but IMO posting PM contents is extremely discourteous, regardless of whether it's against the rules or not.

LOL, that's amazing- Edinburgh is my hometown and the Peacock Inn is one of my family's favourite eateries entirely on the basis of their fish and chips! You chose well!

Re: haggis, even in Scotland almost nobody makes it themselves- Macsween's Butchers are pretty much unanimously acknowledged as having perfected the somewhat gruesome recipe many decades ago and the vast majority of haggis fans are now happy to leave the actual preparation to them. http://www.macsween.co.uk/

Unfortunately for many Scots-descended Americans it's currently illegal to import haggis to the States, but then maybe many American diners are glad of this! LOL

Being Scots, I think most folks here already know what our national dish is.... and a recipe would only suffice to put others off. Made badly it tastes like dog food, but made well I'd trade the finest fillet steak for a spoonful of this "warm, reeking rich" delicacy any day!

Nevertheless, here's a photo- exactly as it we serve it at a traditional Scots Burns Supper, cut open with a "sgian dubh"- a small knife traditionally (and hygenically) kept in the top of your right sock!

The scale handles are crap these days- something weird happenned to them between SU6 and SU7, though I'm not sure what exactly. They're often too big, but the oddest thing is that sometimes they're staggered (haven't worked out what causes that yet so I can't replicate it). Seems so obvious that they should be displayed at a fixed pixel size as Thom suggests- one of the few things Autocad got right... years ago.

This full-size screenshot says it all- how can you take that seriously as a tool in a CAD modelling program?

I was going to post a vertex editing suggesting in the Wishlist forum, but a quick "soft selection" search brought me here. I only started working with 3DS Max fairly recently, but one feature which jumps out as begging to be introduced into SU is soft selection and vertex editing functions. It's the single most useful feature in 3DS Max IMO, but also surprisingly intuitive: the "hot to cold" display system for selecting vertices is brilliant in its simplicity.

I'd love to see a similar function in SU- I'll post this in the Wishlist.

Sorry to do a quantum leap back to the first page of this topic, but that "500,000 plastic coffins" conspiracy theory (like most) is ludicrous. Firstly, they're not coffins, they're grave liners, designed to prevent the ground surface above a grave from collapsing in when the coffin rots away. Wow, the dark forces really want to keep neat graveyards, huh?.

Secondly, 500,000 grave liners sounds like a lot... unless you consider that 150,000 people die per year in the USA of lung cancer alone. So I'm guessing that 500,000 stockpiled grave liners wouldn't even be enough to maintain supply for every death by natural causes in 1 year in the United States.

Thirdly, lets just say the US government has ordered them in preparation for some mysterious fatal event- isn't that what they're supposed to do? Yet another example of "damned if you do, damned if you don't"- If the government don't have the facilities or means to deal with the aftermath of events like Hurricane Katrina, they would be lambasted as reckless and unprepared..... but if they carry out risk analyses, emergency service and military drills, stockpile medical supplies and grave liners the conspiracy theory forums abound with "Ooooohhh, they knew it was going to happen.... no wait.... they MADE it happen!" Where's a yawn smiley when you need one? The puke smiley just seems inappropriate this time.

Brilliant post Remus- Charlie Brooker and that uniquely British style of humourous intellectual critique are sorely lacking on Swedish tv... God I miss it!

So nice to hear someone else (and far more eloquent) than myself ripping into MTV's finest for a change.

Genuine quote from the clip:

Spoiled Girl (screaming): "You have ruined my life!"

For anyone interested this was her tearful response to her mother on receiving a $67,000 Lexus for her 16th birthday.

Ironically of course, in a sense her mother actually has. IDIOTS!

What is "Sky.exe"?

I'm sure you're all familiar with autostitch, but having used it for years for making wide panoramic photos for fun I discovered fairly recently that, as long as you use a tripod and fixed ISO settings (as low as possible) it will stitch sets of photos together to form an almost perfect 360° spherical panorama.

There are a few tricks- the main one being that the sky, especially the upper portion will usually be way too bright so the photos will be extremely over exposed i.e. 255,255,255 white and autostitch can't stitch them. It's better to just photoshop a rendered sky in afterwards. So I just take approx 15 photos of the horizon, then the same number with the camera rotated up a little, just to make sure any close trees or buildings are fully in shot and then the same again with the camera rotated downwards as much as possible while still leaving a considerable overlap with the horizon photos.

Of course you'll need to crop the image and then resize the canvas so it's 2:1 aspect ratio, with the horizon in the exact middle so it'll map spherically and render accurately. It doesn't matter that the very bottom is a bit messy as the spherical mapping is usually messed up at the poles anyway. If it's windy and low clouds were altering the light levels a lot during the photographing process (it usually takes about 10 minutes) you'll probably need to do some dodging and burning to even out areas of the final pano.

The only real limitation (other than time of course) I've found is RAM- my measely 1.5Gb are eaten up for about 20 minutes while autostitch makes a 15000 px wide 80% compressed jpg and after adding the new sky and general touching up in PS I always have to restart my laptop before continuing with any effective work.

In other words (LOL).... I've never tried, but I'm sure autostitch will stitch those Google maps images together really easily.

Pete's not that vain! The most recent SCF challenge winner is always allocated a temporary celebratory status/title until the next challenge is concluded.

The members list is definitely public, or at least I can see it.

Like Chris says, it's in the list at the top of the forum, just like always.

I was reading and clicking through the site for a full couple of minutes, chuckling away with my irony hat firmly on my head when I realised that Conservapedia IS NOT IRONIC, IT IS SERIOUS. I had to read further for another minute to confirm that it wasn't written with tongue in cheek. I mean who, in earnest, splices an image of Darwin and Hitler together as the accompanying picture to an article drawing comparisons within their writings (and Richard Dawkins for good measure)? Conservapedia founder, lawyer and social studies teacher Andy Schlafly, apparently.

In fact, check out the Richard Dawkins article- it actually contains a subsection implying his role in the suicide of a 22-yr-old man as he had read Dawkin's book, become an atheist and (following the logic here?) therefore decided to kill himself. I'm sure the fact that he was a military veteran (presumably meaning he had seen active service, Conservapedia doesn't enlighten us any further) didn't have anything do with his psychological problems. Because reading a best-selling book is more likely to cause you to suffer severe mental illness than active service in war. Now that was writing with tongue in cheek.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Richard_Dawkins#Implication_in_the_death_of_Jesse_Kilgore

From the bowels of the internet indeed!

Interesting find Remus, now any chance you can unfind it?

... and here's a shop to match on the main shopping street of one of Edinburgh's nicer districts.

40"(1016mm) wide at the front, tapers to 18" (457mm) wide at the back and 4'6" (1370mm) deep (but the cellar's HUGE lol). The photo looks ancient, but it was only taken 24 years ago. It remained a coal supplier until just a few years ago- yes, someone actually sat in there taking orders- we always used to peek in when we passed to catch a glimpse of the poor (but obviously not claustrophobic) soul. Now, sadly it's just the novelty display window for an estate agents/realtor, but at least it still has a genuine function.

http://www.corstorphine-trust.ukgo.com/CorstorphineTopics/TheWeeShop.html