Going Going Gone

This post is to inform all my readers that the present www.ajbooker.co.uk website will be changed around Easter 2011 and it is highly likely that the vast majority of free files in the RESOURCES section will then be permanently unavailable

The website started about 2004 when I was still a teacher. I wrote it, mostly between 11pm and 1 in the morning) when schools systems couldn't cope with too many staff files, as a repository of teaching files and an advice centre for my students. It actually started as an electronics website which is still buried deep inside the main site. Over the years it grew and grew and I think it now has about 500+ pages, created on a computer I owned at the time using Dreamweaver. At its peak it had about 2 million hits a year, probably far more as many of these were local caching by schools from around the world

Now the website is so complex to change and time consuming to do so that I have decided to ditch it and start with something more focussed on my present consultancy work, without the myriad extra sites and hundreds of photo pages and images. Please feel free to download as much as possible before then, and if anybody wishes to host the core educational files within their own website, with a suitable link back to my new site, then please email me to discuss what and how

In its place will be a list of hopefully all the projects I have done as a consultant, along with links to sites I have created for clients and my own download areas for a small set of exemplar files

Given the traffic to the site over the years, it is ironic that I never got more than a handful of thank you's from school staff per year, especially as it was clear just before exam time in the uk that hundreds of users per hour were accessing the relevant pages...

I have been on the Internet since we called it Cyberspace (About 1996) and it still seems to me that quality content is what people want, unfortunately just after they have tweeted their dinner menu and updated their facebook status

So please feel free to graze the shoals of data there, but soon I will dynamite the reef!

Image Quality

Every so often there is a game changing bit of software for education. Usually it is the result of a market maturing, Education gets the benefit some years after the technology is used in industry and usually by then the wrinkles have been ironed out. We can see this benefit to education in the plethora of PIC electronic systems, all based on pretty much the same programming kernel and chip (whatever some may argue) and offering near identical levels of performance. Sketchup has been my choice for the last five years whenever a new idea pops in my head and I wish to model it, but the flaw has been the possibility of outputting truly stunning images to compete with the industry best. Certainly Pro Desktops b

uilt in renderer is far better than the different type of image presentation that Sketchup can produce and many teachers have told me they would miss that functionality.

Now there is a new way to output your images created in Sketchup, through a product called Shaderlight. This, like all truly useful education programs, needs as little as one button push from within your Sketchup window to produce a high quality rendered image. For those new to rendering, it basically plots the path of light which reaches every pixel in an image so if a surface is transparent and shiny, the light reaching it wi

ll be affected by what goes through it, illuminates it and reflects off it. There are other renderers out there which many schools use effectively for higher level work, but they take a fair bit of intuition and experimentation to use. To date, Shaderlight seems to be the only one which gets it right with basic functionality that works with that elusive 'one button'. For the more tecchie, yes it supports bump map type functions, comes with built in light models and you can tweak some parameters, but for you running a class of 30 students who need simple results, it can be a single button press! For those new to rendering, expect to twiddle your thumbs a lot. A simple model at 640 x 480 pixels takes about 30 seconds and

as you add more details and lighting and increase the image size, it can run to many minutes, but it runs in the background while you get on with something else.

The sample model here is shown as a Sketchup screen capture, and also as a 1024 x 768 rendered image in Shaderlight. I have spent a couple of minutes optimising the image in shaderlight menu, but not much. This is one of the first 3d models in Sketchup I ever produced. I never thought it would ever look this good without redrawing in a different and sriously more expensive and complicated package...