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Book Review: Digital Art Masters Volume 8
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Digital Art Masters Volume 8 is a new publication by 3DTotal that may shock what you know and want to learn about 2D and 3D arts, by watching at the most awesome works of the best artists

Digital Art Masters Volume 8, published by 3DTotal, is a source of inspiration, learning and amazement for all kinds of people interested in 3D and digital arts.

In its pages you will find case illustrations, walkthroughs, and tips, written by the artists themselves, about how they did the masterpieces that are part of this wonderful compilation.

A total of 50 of the best artists of 3D and 2D found worldwide have been selected to be showcased in this book.

You must notice that the publisher of this book, 3DTotal, is one of the most respected, recognized and popular entities in the 3D scope, also well known ad the publishers of several magazines focused on all kinds of digital arts, and books like this, Digital Art Masters, that compile the best of the digital arts in our days.

Each illustration appears in big size so you can appreciate the details in high quality paper. Oh, I forgot to tell you that this is a hard cover book of the finest quality.

Those are the kind of illustrations that you can find at magazines like 2D Artist of 3D Creative, the kind of images that leave you open-mouthed by their complexity and perfection in all creative disciplines.

There are some that look more sober, just the main figure with a plain background, but incredibly realist, something that you feel is alive. For example, the characters of Mathieu Aerni, or Alexander Beim.

Others are so full of details that you can inspect every centimeter of the illustration and open the book again on another day, and still find a detail that you had not seen, like the angel and the death playing cards at the hospital of Huzheng in his work “Game of Life”, or the incredibly detailed “Koala King” of Rodrigue Prailer.

As we said, every work is preceded of the illustration in all its glory, then you can read the title of the artwork, the author, and the software used to produce it.

This way you know that there are amazing pure 2D works made using solely Photoshop, while others are done with the association of this software with ZBrush, and others with several other tools at the same time, like 3DS Max or V-Ray.

All the process of creation is explained by the authors themselves, in all the stages of the work. From the sketching, blocking, or creation of the meshes, to the texturing, rendering, or detail addition.

This also turns the book into a very useful tool for learning. Even more, the book is very inspiring, and when you feel lost into something you don’t know well how to proceed or begin working, you can flip the pages of this book and always feel inspired by the ideas or by the workflow itself of the masters featured in its pages.

You will know what the authors did, why the did it, what challenges they faced, and all of it is illustrated. You can see the plain UV mapping with the textures in 2D and applied to the model, the screenshot of the modeling or rendering program that shows the position of the lights, cameras and props.

In the case of 2D works you can see the sketching, the addition of lights, details, the mix with 3D elements if it happens, or the detailing of the most important features, and see the artwork as it grows to be a magnificent painting.

The book is also structured in sections, so it covers different topics like Scenery, Characters, Fantasy, or Sci-Fi. The artists are then grouped, so reading each part is an exhaustive examination of works that help you to understand all the phases of creation of those genres.

In brief, Digital Art Masters Volume 8 is a book that you should not miss, a fundamental source of inspiration for professional art makers, and a inspiring tool for hobbyists and people passionate for 2D and 3D arts.

Get it here: Digital Art Masters Volume 8

Digital Art Masters Volume 8 Pre-Order + free playing cards
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The Swordmaster in 3ds Max and ZBrush
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New Book: Blender Master Class
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Blender is a wildly popular open source 3D design suite with a massive base of dedicated users. With professional-grade features and a highly customizable interface, Blender goes toe-to-toe with pricey, commercial offerings like Autodesk's 3ds Max and Maya. Ben Simonds's Blender Master Class (No Starch Press, February 2013, 288 pp. w/ DVD, full color, $49.95, ISBN 9781593274771) teaches readers the ins and outs of this powerful program and shows them how make their artistic visions come to life in three dimensions.

Author Ben Simonds is a professional 3D artist renowned for his creative and inspiring Blender art. Blender Master Class takes readers through the design process for three of his intricate projects: a muscular bat monster, a robotic spider, and an overgrown temple deep in the jungle. Each chapter demonstrates a different step in the artistic process, such as sketching, blocking in, modeling, sculpting, UV unwrapping, adding textures and particles, and rendering a final image. As they follow along, readers will not just learn about the tools and features of Blender and GIMP (the popular, open source image editor), they'll see how an accomplished illustrator uses advanced techniques to refine and perfect his compositions.

"I chose each of these projects to provide a unique set of challenges," says Simonds. "And I use them to help explain how readers can use GIMP and Blender in their own projects. While readers can certainly use the book as a step-by-step tutorial, my real goal is to inspire them to make their own creative choices and make the most out of Blender for their own artwork."

Readers will learn how to:

Work with reference and concept art in Blender and GIMP to make starting projects easier
Create models, from blocking out basic forms to creating complex meshes
Sculpt both organic and hard-surface models
Create hair and fur with Blender's particle systems
Paint textures with Blender and GIMP and map them onto 3D artwork
Light, render, and composite models to create striking, ultrarealistic images

The book's DVD includes files for each project, as well as extra textures, brushes, and other resources. Simonds's stunning examples and real-world techniques in Blender Master Class are sure to inspire and guide Blender users to create their own masterpieces.

3DTotal’s Digital Art Masters Submissions Open
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Packt Publishing reaches 1000 IT titles and celebrates with an open invitation
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Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook
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"Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook" is a new book by Packt Publishing written by Virgilio Vasconcelos, a 3D animator who uses Bender at his work and is also teacher of 2D and 3D animation at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). He has won several awards in international events related to Blender.

You can watch some of the works of Mr. Vasconcelos at his site: http://www.virgiliovasconcelos.com

The scope of this book is to show how an animated character can be produced using Blender. Piece by piece, a humanoid figure is animated, until all the body is provided with bones, limits and the capability to move and be animated (rigged). Then, the author tells us how to combine all this rigging into a life-like movement or animation.

Everything from limbs movement to face expressions is covered, using neat recipes that explain every single step and part of the body.

The book is for 3D modelers that use Blender. Blender is the open source solution for 3D modeling, animation and rendering. During many years of development, it is reaching a perfection and an abundance of features that is much higher than many commercial solutions. And since the 2.5 version, which this book covers, also an ease of use and an intuitive interface that makes it easier to learn, using good books like this and others by Packt Publishing that I have reviewed before.

On Chapter 1, you get yourself introduced to the basic concepts of rigging and animation. It's an overview of the tasks of an animatior, and the starting point to make a good knowledge base so when you start animating you don't get confused or stuck in rutinary tasks.

Everyone that is on 3D knows how strange and confusing it can be at the beginning. Sometimes we find ourselves fighting against a legion of wrong techniques, and having to throw all the work to the recycle bin and start again from scratch. Others, the visual interface and even the concepts behind the interface of the programs we use can be an obstacle. It is better to read books like this, as in this chapter, that don't suppose you have a hint on all this, and avoid the hundreds of stupid mistakes of a beginner before they happen.

The second chapter is about the rig of the torso of our humanoid. The torso is considered to go from the pelvis to the neck. It is logical to begin the rig from the torso (with the origin in the hip, usually) to the rest of the body. The reason is because it is the center of gravity, and in most creatures, most of the limbs have their origin connected to the torso. The bone system grows this way like a plant that has its seed in the center of the figure and grows in all direction.

Also, it needs to be carefully done and have a balance between flexibility and realism. This chapter tells how to take these first crucial steps in making a solid rig.

Chapter 3 is all about the eyes. The eyes is what give real expressiveness to a face. Just with the rig of a torso and the eyes you get 90% of the expressiveness of a figure. In additiion, any photographer knows that the eyes in the face is what everyone looks most of the time. The attention of the public is driven to the eyes of the model. Later, they look to other regions.

Surely you don't want a "Poker Face", so in the next chapter, called this way, you get to know how to recreate full facial expressions, creating up to 12 facial expressions that show the most usual feelings and states of mind of a human face.

On Chapter 5, we transform our character so it becomes fully animated with the addition of the limbs controllers. Our character gets legs, arms and fingers now, fully prepared to what will happen in the next chapters, fully ready to become alive.

The sixth chapter is an introduction to animation in layers, a technique that allows to separate different parts of the animation so you can reuse and modify easier the different parts.

Chapter 7, "Easy to Say, Hard to Do" is a chapter that tells things like how to make poses natural and realist in an animation, by making tricks like avoiding unnatural perfect symmetry, making subtle movements between the main ones, simulating inertia, and so on. This way, the animation goes beyond a robotic sequence and becomes a life-like movie.

On the eight chapter you can apply all that you learned in the previous sections to simulate real life situations like a tennis match or a run through a forest. It's a series of examples that show all the animation of a body applied to different scenarios.

In "Spicing It Up" you will learn other animation techniques that deserve their own chapter. These are basically the addition of actions to a main animation that give more interest and enrich them, or animating things like hair. But the most interesting for me is the use of AniSculpt, the technique for making a mesh deform in an animation, as real muscles and soft bodies deform when they are in movement. This really takes your animations to a higher new level of realism.

The last chapter is a set of more refinements. The most remarkable one is the last section, that teaches how to make talking animations.

After all this, you will find an Appendix, with some practical tips about storytelling, naming conventions and the creation of a smooth transition along a story that you want to tell. It also introduces you to some Blender tools like the Grease Pencil, that allows to paint directly in 3D. This is very useful both for 3D modeling, concepting and animation.

With all this we have that Virgilio Vasconcelos has written a very practical book about animation that explores most of the problems and solutions through a series of chapters that explain many useful techniques to master this art in a very short time.

"Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook" is definitively a recommended book for everyone that wants to become an animator using the most powerful open source 3D suite: Blender 3D.

Book: Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT
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John E. Herreño is an Electronics Engineer from the National University of Colombia. He got interest in open source software and how much it can help in the development of countries. He works doing Drupal web development and Blender training, and develops custom software. You can visit his site at http://jeh3.net

He is the author of the book, "Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT", which consists in 10 chapters that contain 10 projects. These projects are very similar to the situations you meet in real life projects, and are the kind of things that someone who employs or commissions you may ask you.

In real life projects, people ask you to make a final image, model something specific, and things like that. This book covers different projects from beginning to end.

The first project consists in making a render of a sci-fi space scene. This is what a pure 3D artist does at his work, creating a model from scratch, a background, adding effects, and rendering the piece, obtaining a final image that accomplishes the idea in his mind.

The second project, "Fly a Fighter Aircraft Through a Storm", is for creating a war aircraft that flies through some clouds. In this lesson you learn modeling tips, the use of shaders to increase realism of 3D models, with textures and material settings combined, cloud effects with particles, and of course, you learn to animate the flying machine.

This project illustrates the workflow of a 3D animator, whose task is to produce animated films by making 3D models, creating a world around them, and taking them to life by adding movement through time.

The use of blueprints is common in technical 3D modeling of vehicles and industry pieces, for example. In project 3, you learn how to put these skills in practice. A blueprint is a image in a sheet that contains views of an object from the most common angles (top, side, back, bottom, front...). From this blueprint you can model adding increasing complexity and using techniques toold in this project. Finally, you will create a car paint shader.

Notice how in all these projects, the final product of your work is obtained. The author doesn't stops until the final result is obtained, so you can see how real proffessionals work.

In "Create a Professional Looking Demo Reel" you produce something that is often required for most 3D portfolio, and it's a demo reel that showcases your skills as 3D modeler, made using the video sequencer of Blender.

Now that you have become familiar with the video sequencer, it comes the time to learn some of the game engine. As you know, Blender includes a 3D game engine which is very powerful and has been used in multiple commercial and indy games.

In project 5 you learn the basics of this engine using the Python programming language, to build an interactive walkthrough around a building in a 3D environment that uses a skybox, a semisphere with a sky painted on it. This gives you the opportunity to learn how to bake textures in Blender, and also learn simple UV mapping.

Interactive walkthrough are a classic in animation, showcases of virtual reality, and even on intro sequences of games.

On the following chapter, "Detailed Render of the Earth from Space", you'll focus on pre-processing of textures and post-processing of a render. These are all techniques aimed to get the maximum quality for your renders using Blender 3D.

Project 7 is about animating an humanoid character. The book explains later, on chapter 10, how was this humanoid modeled, but the author prefers to explain how to animate it now, because as you have already read the chapters about animation, it's easy for you to understand all this now, without losing the perspective of an animator.

To animate this humanoid figure, you'll be told how to create a skeleton, an armature for the body, with its joints and limits, that can be later animated and deform the humanoid as it walks in an animation.

Humanoid animations have particularities and are the base of many projects in the films and animation industry.

"Create a Snail" is the eighth chapter. It's a journey through the process of creating an organic creature by using both parametric and box modeling techniques. The shape of the snail is also refined using the sculpt tools of Blender, wich are very powerful for artistic modeling and digital sculpture. It also introduces you to the creation of organic shaders and the use of subsurface scattering to simulate beings that have flesh (human or not).

One of the fields in which 3D modeling was widely used from the beginning is architectural modeling and visualization. Chapter 9 is about architectural rendering, in the example of a kitchen. It is also an introduction to lighting, as it's the 50% or more of a good render.

Last but not least, project 10 is about modeling humanoids, by combining the speed of box modeling techniques with the power of Blender's sculpt tools.

To summarize, as you can notice, this is a book that really gives examples of tasks that a pro 3D modeler has to do when he/she is hired by someone. A book from a get-things-done perspective. It is a very good learning material for someone who uses Blender and needs to have a perspective on how the different pieces fit.

When we learn to use a program, we usually learn how to model something, then we see another example on the internet on how to map your UVs, later another piece of the puzzle, another different example on how to make a shader, and so on and on. This book is different because it tells you how to build the whole puzzle. It tells you how to achieve projects from beginning to end, explaining it all with the same project, in a logical ad real-life way: you model something, then texture this same thing, then animate it, and so on, and get a real animation video. Or model something, apply shaders, light it, and render and get a real render.

And the author makes this with 10 example projects carefully chosen to showcase the typical situation for someone who wants to learn to achive the most common uses of 3D.

Get it at Packt Publishing, you won't repent:

Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT, by John E. Herreño

Packt Open Source announce exclusive discount offers on best-selling books
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Upcoming Book Reviews For Blender 3D
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Packt Publishing: Buy 5 Books At 75% Off
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Book: "Unity 3D Game Development by Example"
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This new book on Unity has a subheader that says "Beginner's Guide. A seat-of-your-pants manual for building fun, groovy little games quickly".

The author is Ryan Henson Creighton, experienced game developer and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc. ( http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog ), a company specialized in games and applications for kids and teens.

The book is centered on the Unity 3D platform for building games and virtual scenarios, which allows you to make games that can be played localy in your PC but also on the web, and even make multiplayer web-based games. Unity 3D uses a quite small client web plugin that downloads in seconds, and runs in the browser.

Both Unity 3D and the client are free. So for the developer, there are lots of advantages in Unity derived from being able to run the games in the browser, so they are cross-platform, and the freely available plugin that doesn't discourage people to download it because it's safe, free and small.

So for this book you only need Unity 3D, a free download, and you can start creating games right now. The book is aimed for beginners that never did anything similar, for people that don't like complex programming, or used other graphic interfaces to create worlds and games.

The first two chapters are an introduction to computer games, that gives us a new perspective of them, because the author examines several games from the point of view of both the developer and the player. He gives us advice on how to understand the amount of work behind some type of games, and helps us to choose what game to develop. It is easy for a beginner to get into an enormous task that will never be finished, and after reading this chapter we will have more realist aims.

We'll learn how to recognize when we are getting into problems by learning what kind of games are out of the possibilities of a single developer or a small team.

Chapter 1 is also an invitation to play other Unity 3D games, because it's the best way to understand what the engine can do. Of course, there are installation intructions for the platform, very simple in fact. On chapter 2, we focus on distinguishing what is the logic behind a game and its appearance, so we clearly see the real complexity or simplicity of accomplishing a particular type of game.

Chapter 3 begins the actual game creation, by teaching what Game Objects are: entities in which the protagonists and props of our games are encapsulated, and represent what they are and what they do. And we also learn what to do with them, because you learn how to use physics to manipulate them, and make objects bounce, for example.

Making something bounce wouldn't be enough, if we can't control it, so on "Code Comfort" the author introduces you to what actually builds the games action: scripting. He provides simple examples of scripts that move and control objects in the game. Don't be afraid because everything in Unity 3D happens with a mix of things that you code and others that you just point and click with the mouse, so it's not pure coding. You use code just for those things that may be harder to do in a visual way, and all the rest is done by selecting options and clicking here and there.

Then, in chapters 5 and 6, the lessons are centered in a 2D memory game, because Unity is not only for 3D games, but also because it's a good exersise to be centered in the creation of game controls for the player, and all the game logic behind them.

Chapters 7 and 8 guide you through the creation of clocks, thus learning to better position, hide and show controls, and how to detect the conditions in which a game must be so the application knows that the player has won.

"The Break-Up" is a classic game of catching and avoiding objects that fall, but rebuilt to be 3D. It is developed on chapters 9 and 10. It incorporates particle effects like sparks and explosions,3D models, and the use of scripts to play animations. It also explains how to create prefabs, that are user-defined types that can be re-used, and how to add sound effects.

Another spin for the Break-Up game is to turn it into a space shooter. Yes, it can be done re-using code and objects, although this may seem incredible (chapter 11). In fact, this technique is an advantage of Unity, the easy re-usage of old code and prefabs. It allows to make games faster, and the book provides good example on how to do this in a practical case.

The last chapter is the culmination of all that we learned, and takes other lessons of previous chapters and new tips to build the last details for an original game (already developed in part in previous chapters): Ticker Taker, in which you bring a bouncing heart to the surgery room of an hospital.

And so you finished making your games, you are told how to package them for the Web so you can share them online. As we said, in addition to the ease of creating games with Unity, being able to make your games playable on the web is one of the key features of Unity, maybe the most important one.

"Unity 3D Game Development by Example" is a practical book, realist and full of knowledge for becoming a game maker on this platform. The philosophy of the book is in one of the phrases of the author: "Start building a game with what you know. With each project, set a new attainable challenge for yourself".

This approach is what the book does, and allows you to start building a game maker portfolio, a game making career, right now. You don't have to wait to know everything in the world about something to start doing it. It is much more efficient if you get a decent knowledge first and start little projects of increasing size and complexity through time.

That is the way how mastery in game making is achieved, and also in many facets of life. With this book, as with others 3D books from Packt Publishing, you learn while doing. And that's the reason why you should get it.

"Unity 3D Game Development by Example"

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"

Book Preview: Blender 2.5 Lighting and Rendering
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Book: "Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook"
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"Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook" is a book by Colin Lister, an expert in texture and material creation and film making, who uses Blender in his projects. He is also known for the documentation of these features in popular tutorials in the Blender community.

Blender 2.5 is the next generation of Blender that is now ending its beta process and will be soon available as stable, although you can get it now. With the 2.5 version, Blender adds lots of new features that make it a very advanced and complete 3D suite for modeling, animation, texturing and whatever 3D task you want to do. The old criticism against Blender was that the interface was not easy to learn, but since the last versions this has been solved, and now with 2.5, the interface has become very intuitive. No more strange numbers and letters, Blender 2.5 is powerful and easy, intuitive and usable.

The 3D suite used by many professionals in film making, modeling, and animation, is now accessible by hobbyists and novice modelers.

Being free, can you ask for anything more? Yes, you can. You can ask for a quick way to learn to use it. This is when Packt Publishing and their series of books about Blender comes to the rescue.

This time, "Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook" will teach you everything you need to know to create stunning materials with the application, and you will learn the important skills related to materials, textures and shaders. And you will do it through easy recipes, step by step tutorials and downloadable code, as happens with all the books of Packt Publishing. This is really the highway to knowledge on Blender.

The first chapter, " Creating natural materials in Blender" will teach how to make pebble procedural materials, with all the features of these stones: opalescent, with veins and their particular brightness. It will also tell you how to combine 2 materials to make another more complex one.

The following example is to build rocks, and sea rocks, using photos as reference. This is the way the 3D industry works, the usual workflow: use and take lots of reference photos before modeling and creating the materials.

As in other previously reviewed books about Blender, this book takes a practical approach telling you not only how to do things, but also telling you the pro way to work.

It also tells you lots of tricks, like how to use alpha transparency to simulate mesh complexity, and make changes to a procedural material to simulate seasonal change. This way you get a multitude of effects with a same material to get more diversity. Even more, learning how to use the node editor to combine mats, you get lots of different looking surfaces using the pieces you've built before.

The book, in these and all the other chapters, not only explains the recipe but also how the different parameters of the material work and why we are using those settings, how they interact and what they produce. So in addition to making the recipe, you really learn to understand what you do, and stimulate your mind to solve all future problems and challenges you will face.

In "Creating man-made materials", you'll master metals. These materials need to use specular maps to achieve a believable metallic appearance, and also often include scratches, dirt, aging and rust. All these features need to be done with an economy of resources, and this is what you'll learn here: to use good materials instead a complex 3d mesh to achieve the same good appearance with less polygons.

In the chapter "Creating animated materials", we go beyond static textures and mats, and see how to animate a texture over time and control how it moves in an animation sequence. Also other good effects like altering its color and texture over time, and animate transparency to simulate things like for example a burning sheet of paper. You're given other very often used examples, like how to create a TV that plays movie files.

"Managing Blender materials" is a productivity chapter, that is about how to organize textures and materials. This may seem simple at first, but the book goes far beyond that. It will tell how to create a Blender file that works as a template to create new materials easily, so you can open it every time you want to design a material, or set it as default scene, and work faster.

For this default material scene, it says you what are the ideal settings, and how to pre-configure a Blender layout that is optimized for material creation. It prevents you future problems by suggesting naming conventions for better organized mats, how to append materials to another blender file so they load together, or just link them and keep them separate. If you want to distribute your materials, the book also tells how to pack a blender file with its materials from different sources into a single blend file, something fundamental if you want to pass it to someone in another computer, take it to your work or collaborate with someone.

The next 2 chapters, "Creating more difficult man-made materials" and "Creating more difficult natural materials" are chapters to achieve more professional and complex appearance for your objects. They also solve new situations, and concepts like the use of environment maps to simulate reflections on surfaces, and use of raytraced reflections to get them in render time. Raytraced reflections are also used to achieve visual effects like dirt.

It also explains how to create large planes of water using materials applied to a large square surface, with animated waves and also around objects like the sea rocks created in chapter 1.

Another common task, the creation of leaves for vegetation, is explained. And even more, you learn how to change an unique diffuse texture through the use of bump and transparency maps to make the same leaf look like different leaves that don't repeat.

The book even goes beyond its scope in the chapter "UV mapping and sub surface scattering", and is a good way to start unwrapping models and to edit their UV maps.

For those who love photography (a good skill for a 3D modeler), the author explains how to take color, bump and specular maps from photos, and recommendations on how to take the photos of an human model to get a skin that is good for UV mapping a head or body.

Skin shading is a very difficult task in 3D because of the complex shape of organic models, and also because of how light is scattered under the skin surface, that is what makes the skin look like a living thing, not an opaque inorganic object. Here you'll be told all you need to make it, including how to combine sub surface scattering and ambient occlusion to get a good shading of your 3D model.

"Painting and modifying image textures in Blender" is about the post process of rendered images inside Blender using Blender Compositor, to avoid having to render them all again. It also tells more advanced tricks like painting dirt using materials, or make it look like a drawing, and how to create a 3D view of a photo making it look like aged using material adjustments.

The final chapter, "Special effects materials", gives a way of creating smoke, fire, and flames, make things burn, and animate fire and smoke in animated loops. Fire and smoke are effects that may take lots of CPU cycles to be simulated, so the book also tells how to use billboards of flames and smoke to achieve quick renders, a technique often used in games and online 3D to get believable and fast effects.

For all Blender artists, and those who want to start designing materials in a 3D suite, this book is a must-have. By reading through it you can go to a beginner level to an intermediate, quite advanced expert, in a record time. You just need to follow the book, from the beginning to the end, and lots of notions about shaders, materials and textures will be learnt by you with ease, in a natural way.

Get it at Pack Publishing's site: "Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook"

Upcoming: Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook
(Read more...)

I am currently reading the book by Pack Publishing "Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook" and will soon publish a review here.

This is another book of Packt focused on the most popular 3D modeler today: Blender 3D. As its page on the publisher says, with it you can learn to:

    * Understand the new Blender 2.5 user interface that simplifies creation of materials and textures

    * Explore the complex task of UV mapping of a human face

    * Use the Sub Surface Scattering commands in Blender to create objects the way you want

    * Confidently simulate materials such as smoke, flames, and explosions using the Blender 2.5 Smoke Physics module

    * Create an entire ocean that animates and reacts with objects in the water by using the new Blender 2.5 features

    * Employ simple repeating textures that can be applied with infinite variety without appearing to repeat

    * Synthesize complex materials without complex mesh objects by using alpha transparency

    * Create incredible moving textures and materials by using Blender 2.5 animation curves

    * Create flexible materials that can curve around corners or apply themselves to complex winding meshes without unwanted texture distortion

    * Manage Blender 2.5 materials and textures and effectively apply them to your Blender projects

It's important to notice that this book, as the title says, is using Blender 2.5, the version of Blender that is now in beta and will soon be stable and offer lots of new features and a very improved interface, much easier to use. With this book you can learn to get the most of this version and be prepared for the exciting future that Blender offers today.

This book is now in RAW state. This is a great advantage for you, let me explain. You can get the ebook at 40% of the usual price. The book is not yet finished, but once it is, you can download the full book, so you get the same and save a lot of money.

Even more, if you like, you can preorder the print book at the same time as you purchase the RAW book at a significant discount. There are offers for the ebook + printed book that save 40% of the total.

Up to now, there are already 9 chapters, so if you get the ebook now, when you finish reading and practicing it all, the new chapters and the printed book may be ready for you.

"Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook"

Book: Netbeans Platform 6.9 Developer's Guide
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Intro

"Netbeans Platform 6.9 Developer's Guide" is a book by Jurgen Petri, who is Sun Certified Enterprise Architect, with more than 12 years of experience in developing Java enterprise applications.
He tells you how to build with the Netbeans Platform, the Java modular Swing application framework that speeds up your coding work to build professional applications that are cross-platform. Jurgen already wrote a book about the Netbeans Platform in 2008, but this book focuses on the latest build of the platform.

Netbeans IDE and Java is all that you need. Because both are free, your only invest to become a pro Netbeans Platform programmer is this book.

There are already other books on the Netbeans Platform, but the approach this one has is different. Those other books usually try to be a complete reference for most of the features of the Platform, usually focusing to experienced programmers that just want to have some reminder of what they already know, and without a specific purpose.

This book, as I said, is different. It is a step by step guide through the programming of an application that uses the Netbeans Platform: a task manager. This way, it helps you to get started since the very beginning of your project, and assumes little or no knowledge at all of the platform. Of course, you must be a Java programmer and know some rudiments of the platform. But if you just began to program some module or followed the simplest tutorials at the Netbeans site, you can get started on the Platform with this book and learn to code big applications with ease.

If you have a look to its pages they will remember the tutorials at Netbeans site, because they're much like tutorials of the different steps to build an application, and include screenshots for most of the steps, code, and easy explanations.

One of the main advantages of the Netbeans Platform is its modular nature, so the book starts explaining how to create modules and add them to your application. These modules will communicate with each other, so you will be able to make them work together. This modular approach, which is essential for the Netbeans Platform, makes possible to maintain the code of these modules updated without having to update the whole application. Even more, the integrated updating system in Netbeans Platform allows your users to update your application, or some of its modules, without having to download it all.

Chapter 2 teaches how to build forms, to get modern and neat controls for your applications, buttons, labels, input boxes, and all that. Netbeans IDE integrates a visual designer for this, and this chapter tells how to use it and code the event handling. Once you're familiar to this, you are ready for the following chapter, that is about the windows system in Netbeans.

Chapter 4 is about what is called Lookup in the Platform, that is all those mechanisms that allow your modules to communicate with each other and with the main application. This is essential for any project, without that your application will just be a collection of modules. In addition, most of the tutorials out there and books usually don't give understandable recipes for this, and this book does, so this chapter alone may be an argument to get this book.

Chapter 5 covers the creation of global Actions, that perform some tasks inside the application. You will learn to invoke them through all possible means: menus, keyboard, toolbars... This is an effective way to provide users to make something in multiple ways and increase the usability of your programs.

After that it comes the time to learn about "Nodes and Explorer Views". To summarize, this is a chapter in which you'll learn by example how to separate your application's logic from different possible visual implementations, so if you change your app's GUI later, adapting becomes easy. A fast and neat way to maintain your code in the future, and make drastic changes without too much work.

Working with files and folders, saving and retrieving data to them, is covered in chapter 7. Once you learnt this, the next step is to know how to recognize and manipulate the content of those files, and chapter 8 introduces you to the Data System for that, and for everything else you see in Netbeans applications: add new file types, provide interfaces for those files, change their icon depending on things like their saved state, and so on.

Chapter 9 teaches how to build dialog windows, that go from simple notifications to complex "wizards". Wizards are found in every decent modern application, and increase the usability of software.

Every piece of software today tries to make emphasis on usability. Although the computer skills of most people today are much higher than in the past, computer users today are not the minority of power users and hackers like in the past, and skilled people want to make more in less time. Your applications should not be hard to use, they need to be easy for the newcomer, and ultra-easy and fast to use by the expert, who doesn't want to spend their neurons in understanding your interface.

Chapter 10 focuses on an often forgotten step in application building that is the options and settings, that should be available for the user to customize how the app looks or behaves, usually making a strong use of dialogs learnt in the previous chapter. Again, the focus is in increasing the possibilities of your users to be comfortable with the piece of software you built.

The next chapter is about the Help system for your app. Each of your modules can have its help system, that can be integrated together in a single help system. This makes maintenance simpler, at the same time that the user simply gets the help he needs without caring about where it comes from. Context sensitive help systems are also covered, that is what every user wants nowadays, and not having to search along a list of topics.

After you have built most of the features you need, it comes the time to cut off what you don't need and modify everything so it becomes unique, identified with your software company and project. This is branding, which is covered on chapter 12. Everything, from modules of the platform that you don't use and don't want to be loaded, to the splash screen or the application launcher for the different OSes, or the app's icon...

Your application is mostly finished at this point, so the last chapter comes to explain how to package and distribute your application, create installers for the different OSes, and how to make online updates. Online updates are the way to go, and the Netbeans Platform provides an easy way to implement this, just with some clicks, something that otherwise would suppose lots of coding.

Conclusion

"Netbeans Platform 6.9 Developer's Guide" is the best introductory book I've seen 'till this date about the Netbeans Platform. There are two reason for this: it's practical, and it has a modern approach.

It is practical because the book teaches by example, assumes zero or little knowledge, avoids abstract explanations when it's possible, tells you about real life needs that you may have, and provides the basics of every aspect of the most common features you may want to implement. Reading other books about Netbeans without reading this first may be like trying to go to the University without having gone to school first.

In addition, it has an approach that is realist with what a modern computer user wants: usability. The book tells you about how to build applications that include the features every user expects: context sensitive help, online updates, different ways to do the same actions through the graphical interface, customizable settings and options... And for the programmer (you): how to build code that is easy to maintain, reuse, modify, and update.

This is a book that is NOT for people who want to spend their lives with theory and reading. This is a book for people who want to get things done, start making real projects with the Netbeans Platform. So go and get it, you won't repent.

Netbeans Platform 6.9 Developer's Guide

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