There are some things I hate about “in-flight” models of piston-engine aircraft. One is when the aircraft appear to be flying without a pilot; the other is a stationary propeller.
Modellers have a couple of ways of dealing with this second problem. One is to simply remove the propeller blades, leaving only the filled and smoothed spinner visible—it’s a well-recognized technique which many feel produces the most realistic appearance. But it always makes me think, Where’s the propeller? I find the complete absence of anything in the space where the propeller should be is a little distracting. I’m also not very keen on the photo-etched “prop-blur” option, which aims to produce a blurred sector for each prop blade, reproducing what we see in photos and movies, but not what we see with the naked ey
Tag Archives: Tutorial
Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 4
At the end of my previous post on this topic, I left you with this map of the area around the mountain of Blaven (Gaelic Bla Bheinn) on the Isle of Skye: That concluded a three-part tutorial on using Ordnance Survey OpenData products in QGIS mapping software. (To go to the start of the series, … Continue reading Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 4
Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 3
I finish my last post about using Ordnance Survey OpenData in QGIS having produced this map of the area around Blaven, on the Isle of Skye: It’s tinted for height, shaded and marked up with contours to emphasize landforms, and has features such as surface water, coastline, roads and buildings added. Now it needs some … Continue reading Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 3
Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 2
So, by the end of my previous post on this topic, I’d used Ordnance Survey OpenData products in QGIS to produce a nice smooth depiction of the topography of Ordnance Survey grid square NG, tinted to show height and shaded to show relief. It looked like this: A detail, showing the region around the mountain … Continue reading Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 2
Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 1
Recently, I’ve been preparing my UK walking maps using the Ordnance Survey’s free OpenData products, which I’ve rendered into maps using a free, open-source Geographical Information System, QGIS. I thought I’d write a little bit about that, now that I’ve got my maps looking more or less as I’d like them. For this first part, … Continue reading Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 1
Running Windows XP Under VirtualBox
As I write, it’s only another month until Microsoft’s free upgrade offer on Windows 10 expires (on 29 July 2016). I am so looking forward to that day, in the hope that it’ll mean an end to Microsoft’s intrusive little pop-up messages in the lower right corner of my monitor, and their increasingly devious attempts … Continue reading Running Windows XP Under VirtualBox