MadModder

Excellent 

Well, then I kinda figured might as well light them and see what happens........

What happened was Number 83 took off at 1500 RPM and the base of the smokestack oxidized to a beautiful shade of purple:! Finally Number 83 was running on wood, after 18 years, doing what it was intended to do! 
 

I’m watching with great interest but my get up and go to a large extent has got and gone! I do still occasionally power up the gen set for the induction furnace to blow out the cob webs and run the pump to raise water from the bore hole through the heat exchanger as this keeps the field drain return to the stream clear, but apart from sometimes raising a bar to red heat in the pot for a bit of fun it remains idle sadly.

Previously I haven't done much video editing, except simple stuff back in the days in Virtualdub. I was looking for ways to make a video, that has more than one videos in it. No need to look any further - Blender has its own video editor:

 
 
On the upper left side is the folder with video files. On the bottom are the channels, where video files can be dragged. In the upper middle window videos can be scaled and moved, using same shortcuts (G for moving, S for scaling) as with the objects in 3D window. Output is rendered to .mkv video format, which is then ready to be uploaded to Youtube:



What comes to 3D rendering, from newcomer's perspective, there's an option to use OpenGL preview renderer to render the output of animation without any scene setup(lighting, cameras, object materials/textures etc). It basically takes series of screenshots of the viewport, therefore being very fast.

For some reason, its output (be it single image or video) has quite dim or faded colors, when actual 3D viewport is compared to rendered image. Maybe it's about some settings that I haven't yet found:

  

Some Land Rover engines have  jets of oil played on the under side of the piston crown for cooling as I imagine do many other engines

Thanks for the info . I don't remember seeing that kind of cooling solution. But here we go, my knowledge about engines is limited to small, model ones.

What comes to mechanical animations, like gear trains, there seems to be several ways to achieve desired results. One that I'm particularly interested, is using previously mentioned rigid bodies where several objects react to other ones in "physical" way. It may sound like I know what I'm doing, but it's trial and error process. Although there are, no doubt, very sophisticated ways to achieve expected outcome, those are for advanced users; I just prefer the 'hands on' approach instead.

It's sort of like playing with lego blocks. Animated and/or simulated objects can be modified to affect the result, like in this video, which uses same objects that were in previous video, with added elements. I didn't expect such a result, but it's actually going to the direction I'm after:

 

In the end, again some critique (not to blame by any means) about Blender:

- Its user manual has almost 6000 (yes, thousands) pages, but it's more like a reference, as there doesn't seem to be instructions that newcomer could easily follow (that's probably why Youtube has zillions of tutorials).

- Some functions (like object's properties, and how it shows in the viewport) are scattered around, and usually it takes search on the net to find out where, and which terms to look for.

- Preferences menu (especially 3D viewport one) is like wild jungle, having hundreds of options to adjust UI colors, which is actually very good idea, but to find the element one wishes to adjust is not necessarily that easy.

In the end, Blender might be a great tool to just play with.