Hiperia3D News: January 2011

GroBoto V3 Booleans: Easy For Beginners, Perfect For The Pro
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GroBoto is a strange piece of software. On one side, it allows you to build intricate images made of tons of primitives, and create instant art of great complexity like a fractal generator. On the other it can animate and make videos of the evolution of these artistic shapes in time.

GroBoto comes with a render engine included that can render at high speed and produce neat and beautiful images in seconds, with stars, fog and sources of light.

Now, since version 3, it can also be something more: a powerful boolean modeling application, capable of exporting perfect meshes in OBJ file format.

See some turntables here: http://www.groboto.com/v3Beta/Folios/v3turntable/index.html

GroBoto is a way to sketch and build 3D models at top speed, using many boolean shapes, each one with several parameters that you can adjust to make the most different shapes.

You will be able to move, scale or modify the primitives that make a boolean shape in every moment, and group the pieces that form them in groups. Once you finish your modeling, you can use it inside GroBoto, or export it in OBJ as a single unified mesh.

You have great control on how the exported meshes will be built. By using dials you can set things like the beveling of the borders, and preview every change before exporting. You can even tweak particular primitives to override the settings of the whole object, until the exported mesh is perfect for your needs.

And those needs may be low poly (as games, or virtual worlds) or relatively high poly (as digital sculpting, render). Either way GroBoto will produce the right mesh, with the proper settings.

Many people are using GroBoto as a way to speed up their modeling workflow. You simply learn to think of objects as made of primitive shapes, something that most of us tend to do when thinking in how to build something.

Then, instead of fighting against the limitations of your 3D modeling package, you open GroBoto and build the shape, in a very simple an intuitive way.

After that, you export the mesh with the settings that fit your needs. And voila! You can then use it as it is, or continue sculpting the mesh in ZBrush, Blender, or Sculptris if you are a digital sculptor, or convert it to an STL or VRML file (for example with Blender) for 3D printing, or use it for a render application, or start adding the skeleton for animation... Anything you wish, with a flawless mesh that has no nonplanars, no complications, nothing to fix.

Complex shapes that are very hard to do without using booleans, or take a lot of steps and time, are simple to do using GroBoto. Think in a simple round hole in a box. How many steps do you have to take in your 3D modeler to get this? In GroBoto it's a child's play. And also ask yourself, if your 3D modeler has boolean modeling tools, what is the quality of the meshes it builds? And can your modeler face any complex boolean calculation? Or it hangs? And much more: can your boolean objects be edited at any time? Do they offer you complete control on how is the final mesh shaped? GroBoto can do all this.

And you'll save a lot of time because you won't have to repair anything. With the proper settings, you get neat meshes that have all what is considered a professional result:

- A mesh made of quads and maybe few triangles only where quads can't be applied
- A consistent and regular size of quads, that doesn't make render errors
- Micro-beveled borders (if you want them) that render well in any engine
- No nonplanar faces, no n-gons
- No overlapping meshes: everything in a single mesh, or in parts that fit perfectly, without overlapping.

More cool features: you can save your boolean models as primitives, add them to the library, and use them to build other models later.

Need to know more? Or you can now guess the possibilities of increased productivity in all areas of 3D modeling?

Are you new to 3D? Then GroBoto is also for you because you will start modeling with booleans, the easies way, and make perfect models, and in the future GroBoto will be the starting point of your more complex projects. A starting point that will give you no headaches.

Go now, get GroBoto as I did, you won't repent.

http://www.groboto.com/

http://www.groboto.com/v3Beta/

Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook
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As said before, the best library about the most popular and feature-rich 3D suite, Blender, is published by Packt Publishing. Next month of May will have another book on these series: "Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook", although you can get it now as a RAW e-book.

One of the strong points of Blender is animation. Entire animation films have been done with it. This book is to learn how to rig and animate characters with Blender.

This book offers clear, illustrative, and easy-to-follow recipes to create character rigs and animations for common situations. Bring your characters to life by understanding the principles, techniques and approaches involved in creating rigs and animations, you'll be able to adapt them to your own characters and films.

The book offers clear step-by-step tutorials, with detailed explanations, screenshots and support files to help you understand the principles behind each topic. Each recipe covers a logical step of the complete creation of a character rig and animation, so you're not overwhelmed with too much information at once.

As we've seen in other book reviews, this is the practical and pragmatic approach of Packt to any topic. That is what makes them essential books for those who want to learn and save time.

What you will learn from this book :

    * Refine your animation with Blender tools
    * Understand principles behind movements like walking, running, jumping and weight lifting
    * Stay productive with an organized animation workflow
    * Create flexible face rigs with a mixed approach
    * Learn how to stretch the arms, legs and spine of your characters
    * Create corrective shape keys
    * Fine control your character's eyes
    * Switching between IK and FK for arms and legs in a shot
    * Create an IK foot setup with 3 pivots
    * How to track your animation arcs and timing

Read more about "Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook" at Packt Pub's site.

Book: Blender 2.5 Lighting And Rendering
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"Blender 2.5 Lighting And Rendering" is a new book published by Packt Publishing and written by Aaron W. Powel, freelance artist and tutor, webmaster of CGShark.com.
As you can read in the title, it is updated to the brand new Blender 2.5, although you can use it on the current stable version, but you can be sure that when 2.5 reaches the stable state, all that you've learned is up to date. With it, you learn the present and tomorrow of lighting and rendering inside Blender.

Lighting and rendering is everything when we're making synthetic images of 3D models. These two words comprise everything that someone who sees our images calls realism, quality, or atmosphere. Some 3D models simply fail to show how good they are because their modelers did not had the knowledge to make them display all their complexity and quality in a good render, lightened the proper way.
The author wants to tell us how to achieve these attributes, and as an expert, he really does that.
The book goes through 9 lessons, that are like circles on a spiral staircase: you go through them smoothly, deeper and deeper into the topic.
The first chapter begins with an introduction to color theory. Why? Because the color of light sources greatly influences what we see as the colors of objects. Even more, colors is reflected by object, and tints the other colors by the light that is reflected. This makes necessary to understand how colors interact.
The book introduces us to the color wheel, and concepts that may be familiar to photographers, like the color temperature, chromatic adaptation, and so on.
Powel also tells us about the basics of lightning in Blender, the types of lights that we can use, when and why. And there is even an interesting explanation on what is the minimum number of lights to get a well lightened image, what do these light do, and how to place them. This is called a light rig, and we'll be doing light rigs all along the book, and learning by practical examples how to place and adjust lights to get perfectly lightened scenes. Again, like a photographer in his study.
On chapter 2, "Outdoor lighting: setting up our scene", the author explains not only how to do this. He also explains, like in other practical Blender books by this publisher, practical workflows for professional works. Not only learning how to do things, but also how to do them in less time, with less effort and more results.
He also turns us into a sort of detective of lights. Makes us ask ourselves many things about how is an scene made, how should it be lightened. This way, we learn with this book how to analyze a situation, and get realism.

"Ambient lighting techniques in Blender" is a chapter about lighting with advanced techniques to get accurate shadowing. Blender 2.5 adds 3 ambient lighting features: ambient occlusion, environment lighting, and indirect lighting. It can use 2 methods for rendering this kind of lighting: raytraced and approximated.
Everything of this can be strange for you, but by the practical examples of the book you will learn them the best way: seeing how they look.
The next two chapters are a revision of everything that was explained before but at a deeper level, telling yo things like how to do transparent or reflective materials for example, or the use of layers to apply different lighting to some objects to make them stand out of the rest of the scene.

"Blender 2.5 Lighting And Rendering" also introduces you to UV mapping inside Blender, explaining all the process and also texture making using GIMP, the powerful free graphics editor.
The process continues on the following chapter, through the integration of the texture map into the objects and tweaking all the materials and render to get a stunning final result. We will also learn to organize our folders in a big project, to better find and reuse our assets.
And the most interesting, the use of Blender's Node Compositor to make textures inside Blender combining materials already created for our object.
Something that really caught my eye while reading this chapter was the final touch of adding depth of field to the render, like in photography, getting a render with blurred background, focused on the main subject, really beautifying the scene to get art beyond realism.
At this point of reading the book, you already have acquired a deep knowledge of lighting and rendering. It is the time to combine all that you learnt. In chapter 8, "Combining Indoor and Outdoor Lighting Techniques", you seek the correct mix between artificial and real lighting. This situation is the real world situation most of the time, like when we have a light bulb inside a room but the sunrays also coming from a near window. So mastering this means mastering the maximum realism for your scenes.
The last chapter goes even deeper, and uses a real world photo as a model and teaches us how to mimic it inside Blender, so we achieve photorealism, as a culmination of everything that was told in this book.
Summarizing all this, "Blender 2.5 Lighting And Rendering" is a book that you may want to have because of its approach to the lighting and rendering topic.
All the lessons are illustrated with lots of screenshots, and the minimal text if it can be explained by an image, and long paragraphs only in those parts that need you to understand why something is done and when.
It's a very practical and analytic book, that gives a general view of all elements since the beginning, and then, in each chapter, introduces you to a new knowledge in each aspect. So you start being a novice but knowing all the basics in every aspect, and then you are on the way of becoming an expert when you finish, because you learn more and more on the topic, connecting the new lessons with what was explained before.
Think no more, get it and become a master of lighting and rendering in Blender:

"Blender 2.5 Lighting And Rendering"

3DHobby Magazine
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Mythic Collection For Poser And DAZ Studio
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Emma Alvarez and Ironman13 just launched a new product:

Get it here: Mythic Collection: Poses and Backdrops

Sometimes people buy backgrounds and it's hard to match the characters with them. So those beautiful backgrounds end being useless. This product allows matching them perfectly with your characters.

The backgrounds can be open in Photoshop or any other app for 2D users, and also loaded into Poser or DAZ Studio. You can also add lights that come with this pack. There are 2 types of light: with IBL and ambient occlusion, and others that don't have this but look great and can make very fast renders. Both are specially done for these backgrounds.

The 10 backgrounds are huge (2400x3000, 300 ppi), you can scale them very big, but in addition they also come in preloads scaled for V4. You can rotate them to change the perspective, translate and frame them with the camera to get interesting results.

In addition, it has 60 poses that Ironman13 did specially for each background. Some are thought for some of the backgrounds but you can use them in any of them.

Contents:
• 10 Backgrounds, 2400x3000, 300 ppi, JPG for use in any graphics editor
• 3D Backdrop to use the backgrounds directly in 3D, Poser and Daz Studio. Move, translate and rotate to adjust it to your needs.
• 60 poses for V4 for use anywhere (30 left + 30 right)
• 60 poses for V4 that match preloads (30 left + 30 right)
• 10 MAT poses to change the backdrop texture + Daz Studio adjuster for use in Daz
• 10 matching IBL + Ambient Occlusion light sets
• 10 matching non-IBL no AO light sets
• 10 Preloads with backgrounds and lights already in place
• Render Settings for Poser
• Render Settings Tutorial to get the most out of your renders!
• Quickstart manual with instructions and usage tips to get the most of this product!

Get it now as launch price 30% Off!!!

Get it here: Mythic Collection: Poses and Backdrops