BLENDER 2.5 CHARACTER ANIMATION COOKBOOK REVIEW
Written by Virgilio Vasconcelos and published by Packtpub Publishers.
Virgilio is professor of 3D and 2D digital animation from Brazil. He contributes to translations, consultations writing of articles for Edirtora Europa that publishes magazines such as 3D world Brazil.
He has worked at Nitrocorpz Design Studio as animator and 3D generalist.
http://virgiliovasconcelos.com/
This book is for users who already understand the Blender interface, know how to model, render and are eager to go the next step of animation. Bringing the character to life.
The book has 50 recipes describing each process to understanding character animation. The support files are available at Packtpub Publishers www.PacktPub.com
available for download.
The book has 277 pages broken down into 10 chapters.
In Chapter 1 there is a proper introduction to rigging. Explanation on what rigging is and how to go about creating rigs and complicating them enough but also simplifying them enough for an animator.
The complexity of an animation must be just right. Not too simple, not too complex. Just enough for an animator to create realistic animation.
Understanding orientation in relation to building bone structure.
In Chapter 2-Rigging the Torso. Gets more focused into rigging something specific .The torso. Some of what is covered here is rigging the character and making the character breathe. Interesting hah.
Despite the author writing the recipes, he encourages the reader to be free and explore different techniques of rigging a character.
He goes ahead to show us how to create the torso…stretch a character and also how to make your character look alive.
The other chapters covered include Eying Animation. Controlling the eyes…considering eyes express a lot of emotions. How do you rig a character’s eye. Surprisingly it’s one the hardest parts to rig properly. Virgilio describes the whole process pretty well enough for Blender user to understand.
Facial Rigging-Which also includes adding expressions. Pretty complex stuff to learn but explained very well also.
After rigging, what next. Animation. How do you go about animating the bones and making sure nothing turns the wrong direction and achieving that smooth realistic animation. The Chapter-Blending with the Animation Workflow covers:
- Animating layers
- Changing between forward and inverse kinematics. Grasping and throwing objects (always wondered about that)
- Non-linear animation and other equally important topics.
You get to understand the amount of time you spend in creating an animation whether for personal project or professional work. That’s why organization from the word go is absolutely vital from the word go.
Virgilio uses recipes that are pretty easy to understand and some good reference as well.
As much you might be happy when you are done with this chapter. It’s not exactly over yet. You still have to master the basics. When to pose, when to stretch…basically knowing when to move and when to pose.
Chapter 7 Easy to Say, Hard to Do: Mastering the basics.
Virgilio explains to you:
- Adjusting and tracking time
- How to handle poses
- Anticipating an action.
The fun thing about mastering the basics is it will become instinct, as you get better at it. You will always know what to do. That is quiet cool.Somebody else is going to ask you sometime how do you know what to do, but you just do.Enough practice.
The next few chapters put what you have learned to test. He still emphasizes on the importance of planning. It’s something that should not be overlooked.
He gives us a recipe on animating a tennis serve. We get to define the extreme positions that that tell a story of what is about to happen. How do you go about creating extreme positions then basic time adjustments.
It’s pretty fun.
Chapters 9 and 10 cover animation refinements acting in animation.
Make animations more fluid like and with consistency, you will deliver better animations.
He uses pretty good visuals (images) to pass across the message.
Next is why do you animate the character when you animate it. The reason behind everything. Fluid movements are useless without a reason behind those movement. That means understanding why the character does what he does.
Virgilio nails it on the head in this book.
The book is a fun read and with the recipes and time, one will be good in a position to engage in character animation and eventually be a master.
pc/mac requirements for 3D
I know for a fact that there are many questions in the air concerning the perfect system requirements for 3d regardless of the platform.I hope this info will be of assistance.
As a long time user of Maya unlimited, I can tell you one thing for sure, and that is get as much CPU power and RAM as you can afford, with the absolute best display graphics card as well.
Before splashing out on a quad core Mac, ensure that Maya will actually use all the processors, as at present, the majority of software on the Mac or any other platform for that matter, is pretty much only written for dual dual core processors, and before any application can utilize the quad processor systems and by quad processors I mean 4 actual processors not 2 X the 2 cores, I am referring to 4X the dual cores OK.
Maya is now owned by Autodesk, and although they have maintained their Mac versions of Maya, Autodesk, is not a truly Mac friendly company, so in that respect the Dell may better suit your purposes. There is no doubt that Autodesk cannot afford to ignore the Mac especially with Maya, but with their Flagship software 3D Studio Max, they have at least at present, no known plans to port it to the Macintosh, although with the release of the Intel Macs, that may well change.
Overall the Mac is a superior graphics systems, mainly due to its ease of use and setup Etc. It is also, at the moment pretty safe from viruses Etc. This may or may not last. In 2006, there were 3 new attempts to gain access to Macs via trojan horses, however Apple did manage to block these holes fairly quickly.
The latest write up comparing speeds on the quad core with the dual core did indicate that unless the software was specifically written for the quad cores (Most is not), then you would actually get more bang for your buch going with the dual cores.
What generally happens in these situations, is the companies have to get their latest technology onto the market, leaving the developers time to catch up. In my experience, getting the latest and greatest, is a waste of money, because by the time the software is capable of fully utilizing the hardware, a newer better designed version of the hardware is available on the market, that suits more company’s software, than the original release did.
Ultra large agencies that work for Hollywood Etc, can afford to have their software custome designed to utilize all this new stuff, you and I generally cannot.
From the sound of things, you will not exactly be pushing Maya to its Limits, although no matter what you are doing, the more Power you have ACTUALLY available the better off you are. Remember the power may be present, in a computer, however that does not necessarily mean it is available to every application used on that system.
I have used Multi Processor PC’s for 3D applications, and I most certainly do not think that in the Long run that a Dell would be such a good idea.
3D Modeling and animation is such a specialized subject that most people use, computers (PC’s) specifically designed to work as 3 D platforms.
They are fully equipped, often with special Graphics cards that are very expensive, and in actual fact can end up costing more that an equivalent Macintosh.
You will find that there is a wider choice of 3 D applications available for the PC, but the mac has it’s rising stars as well.
Summary, get either a dual Core MacPro, with as much RAM as you can afford with the absolute best graphics card, supporting 3D as is possible. Please note that a 3D card designed for rapid display of 3D elements in a 3D game, is very different from a 3 D card designed to make the best use of your CPU power for rendering purposes.
That will probably be your best solution for an off the shelf system, that is relatively easy to use.
On the other hand, get a PC from a company that designs 3D workstations specifically, I would have to do a Google Search to find one of these companies, as they are increasing in numbers.
Dell may have entered this market, but generally are aimed at the home Business User, Game systems, Business systems.
I am not aware of Dell entering the 3D animation modeling market, although they could have done so by now.
It is the entire system you need to be concerned with, not just the CPU.
A MacPro, is probably the only system that is a standard off the shelf Ferrarri.
All the other companies will have to assemble one specifically for you.
Call Dot at NicheVideo.com, they deal specifically with Autodesk, and Macintosh systems, PC’s as well and will probably be ideally positioned to help make a good decision that will be to your benefit rather than some dealer who sells massive amounts of systems all over the world, who has very little interest in you as an individual. If you do not want to use Nichevideo.com, the find a company that deals exclusively with CAD,3D, Animation and Video. The will be the ones who are the best suited to help you get going in this business.
To a company that sells the entire range of merchandise, that is oriented to the work you wish to do, you are a valued customer.
To the companies that manufacture these items, you are just another sale.
Service is everything and I use only 2 companies in the US to fulfill all my requirements.
One for the Audio/Recording business, Sweetwater.com, because the service they provide me with is incredible, as is there tech support for everything they sell.
Niche Video for the Graphics, Video, Networking basically everything else.
For the same reason I use Sweetwater.
Get a relationship with a good supplier, and you will never regret it. Buy bits here and bits there, and it will not be long before you are queued up on some support forum somewhere trying to get fixes from others who did the exact same thing. It is worth spending a little extra now, to get fantastic support when you need it OK
The bottom line is that although speed is an essential with 3D work of any kind, most of that speed is required for the rendering.
Of course as your works become more complex, you will need more speed just to be able to see what you work is beginning to look like. Often a Snapshot is good enough for this, and you will learn as time goes by, how to turn off the display of certain elements, so that your actual modelling power is not reduced to a Crawl.
The Mac with it’s abilities in Graphics, is in many ways superior to an equivalent PC, but overall the PC’s are faster in terms of raw speed.
That however is not all there is to this game. You will find as time progresses that you need so many support applications for your software, that ease of running the system, and application installation and use Etc, is as important as speed. Above all resistance to viruses and other attacks is well worth thinking about. No one is immune, but Macs seem to suffer less.
I know this is a definitely Mac biased message, but do not go into 3D modelling without at least checking out, specific, custom made PC 3D Workstations, as they can be awesome systems, especially when specifically configured as 3D Digital Workstations.
I hope this message helps to some degree. If you wish, you can contact me directly at stuarta@macosx.com
Stuart
Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook
Blender 2.5
Materials and Textures Cookbook
Written by Colin Litser and published by Packtpub Publishers.
Colin Litser began his passion for animation, and things 3D, after studying for an Art degree with 3D in its title. He is currently a contributing editor to Essential Blender.
This book is 291 pages, 9-chapter tutorial. A tutorial cutting across through levels of animation, modeling, special effects, painting, modifying image textures and a whole lot more.
The book covers the creation of several things in chapters.
Chapter 1. Natural Materials
Natural materials like rocks. It seems quite simple doesn’t it? It goes on to teach you how to texture the rock using nodes.
For somebody new but relatively familiar with Blender, this book is for you! For each chapter, the tutorials start with simple objects moving on to a bit more complex objects.
Chapter 2. Man-made Materials
Really impressive. Being one of the most used textures or materials, learning how to make those textures is pretty important.
Colin has created different tutorials in this chapter but all of them are related and lead to one thing in the end. It’s like making different parts of something then to realize they were parts of the same thing after everything is done. In this case, a roof. A copper plated rusty roof that emphasizes age, tileable, weathering effect and what not.
It’s pretty awesome, I was getting excited myself while going through thinking I can actually achieve something that has been bugging me for a while.
What we basically get to learn here is:
- Warping a texture to disguise seams in a repeated texture.
- Combining material using nodes.
- Creating realistic copper material.
- Adding oxidization weathering to our copper material.
That and among others, you’ll get to know once you get the book.
Chapter 3
3 is all about animation baby! Animating materials. That was new to me too, I wondered if it was possible and it is!
What’s covered in this chapter is:
- How to move texture and create animation without moving mesh.
-This can be done in a couple of ways one of them being:
Using coordinates to move texture over time.
Very interesting stuff, and once you know all that think of what you can do!
One more thing , Colin explains how to animate transparency in texture e.g. to represent a burning sheet of paper.
Chapter 4
For you to begin creating you first need to know how to manage a Blender scene, materials.
- Setting an ideal Blender interface.
- Setting up a scene for materials creation
- Naming materials and textures
What got me excited was appending materials.
This means using materials and textures in other
Blend files. Reusing them to save on time and money of recreating them again
Blender gives you the tools to make this possible.
While appending has its advantages, sometimes we may have to work with proxy objects and materials in production. In this situation, it’s vital to have linked materials. This helps because a link is retained to all multiple blend files. Once something is changed in the source file, that it’s updated in all other multiple blend files, and that saves you time.
I learned something new as well. Packing of files, what is called archiving in 3dmax.Something that enable’s you to pack textures and materials into one file and be able to move and work with the same from a different machine.
Awesome!!
Chapter 5
Explores further man-made materials but gets a bit more complex. For example, Colin shows us:
-How to create rust iron-based materials.
-Varying raytracing reflections to simulate dirt and grime.
Pretty sleek!!
Chapter 6
Like 5, 6 explores more complex material creation but more natural than man-made like:
- -creating a wave surface using textures (imagine that)
- -Creating imagine and bump maps with alpha channels.
Sweet stuff.
Chapter 7
Forget creating in this chapter, this chapter is all about UV Mapping and subsurface scattering.
Here we explore mapping textures directly on the faces of the mesh. An area where this is expressively used is the simulation of skin, from the leathery exterior of a dinosaur to the ultimate nirvana of the human head.
Through this chapter we work through common UV problems and their solutions in Blender.
- You learn how to create a face map from a photograph
- Learning how to extract color, bump and specularity.
- Applying UVs to create an accurate skin material
This book is all about accuracy in complexity.
Chapter 8
Painting & Modifying Image Textures in Blender
- In this chapter we will cover:-
- Post processing rendered images from within Blender (ocean animation)
- Adding several materials to a surface.
- Adding dirt to a model &
- Creating an aged photo with simple Blender materials
We learn ways to speed up renders and animations by using special painting techniques to significantly lower render times.
All these could save you time as well as minimize the agony to tight timescales.
Chapter 9
Chapter 9 is all about special effects. Some of the things we learn here are:
Creating smoke in blender
Adding complex FX without the render overhead.
Knowing special effects is a very crucial skill in 3d and digital media as a whole. It plays a big role in this industry and has propelled Blender to the forefront.
The difference between smoke and fire and explosions is all about textures and knowing how to even switch between those materials, knowing this will put you on top.
Bottom line, this book is crucial link between the not so beginners and the ones well versed in Blender. Each chapter as I said earlier has been broken down into tutorials that all add up to one thing.
It has important information on crucial aspects of 3d like UV Mapping and special effects.
In my opinion, a must read. I only wish it had more recipes!!
REVIEW: BLENDER 2.5 LIGHTING AND RENDERING
REVIEW: BLENDER 2.5 LIGHTING AND RENDERING
Blender book written by Aaron Powell and published by Packtpub Publishers.
The book delves into lighting and rendering in Blender 2.5, the latest version of the Blender software.
The book has 217 pages in 9 chapters.
Chapter 1
This chapter covers an introduction to color and lighting basics.
For you to understand lighting and how to achieve it realistically you need to understand the basics of color and how they relate to each other.
From there we get to learn the different light s in blender then how to set up a lighting rig. There are of three types:
♣ 1 point light rig
♣ 2 point light rig
♣ 3 point light rig.
Chapter 2
After understanding that, he now sets up a scene.
Chapter 2 is now about setting up different lighting scenes depending on the environment like outdoor scenes.
When lighting up a scene, there are things that must be taken into consideration before going ahead and just lighting up a scene. For example, if it’s an indoor scene than an outdoor scene.
For better understanding of what is being described, Aaron provides files to be used as practical examples hence better understanding.
Chapter 3
Ambient light-its light reflected off of surfaces, that’s light not attributed to any specific light source.
In Blender 2.5, we have 3 ambient lighting features:
♣ Ambient Occlusion
♣ Environment Lighting
♣ Indirect Lighting
He further gets to explore and learn how to activate the different features of lighting, understanding how each feature affects a scene, how to customize each of the features for a particular scene and also how to use one rendering algorithm over the other.
After this you would be really pleased with yourself!
Chapter 4
Adding light to a scene is only half the battle, we also have to learn and know how to add material to achieve a particular feel.
Chapter 4 goes about breaking down the process of applying material to an object. Blender 2.5 has four material types having 2 new ones in this version not available in the previous ones.
♣ Surface
♣ Wire
♣ Volume
♣ Halo
This can be very useful and saves you a lot of time. Surface mesh is the typical mesh we get normally when creating an object. Wire renders out meshes in wire frame.
The newly added ones volume, which creates a volumetric fog effect and halo which enables mesh to emit light and glow.
It covers all aspects of a material from diffuse and specular properties and shader models.
We are taken through the functions of the each feature available to meshes when adding materials and as always there we have experimental files to download and work with.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5 explores indoor lighting. The previous chapter was about applying materials to an object depending on the scene/environment and the lighting to be used.
For this chapter we have been given a project file of an indoor scene to use in this chapter.
First, Layers. Using layers to enhance our render. To be able to light an object more than the rest. We explore this feature in this chapter. Apart from learning how to organize layers to achieve maximum render. This chapter is also about lighting an interior scene. What lights to use, how to place them and adding of ambient light.
A pretty good experience.
Chapter 6
It was hard at first for me to actually get to start learning UV mapping. I found it tedious ,hard to understand and wondering if the effort is worth it.
But, it is. Normally when I take a look at a complex render scene. I get amazed and impressed by the detail of modeling, lighting and texturing. Which means the effort is well worth it.
Continuing with the scene from the previous chapter, we map a bottle. Unwrapping and applying custom made labels at specific parts of the bottle using Gimp to create the texture..
By the end of it all, we should have a pretty good idea of how to go about UV mapping.
Chapter 7
Chapter 7 is a continuation in the texturing of the whole scene.
But we also get to learn about nodes and using them to create materials. In this case, glass material.
Chapter 8
Combining Indoor and Outdoor Lighting techniques
It’s not always that we use the same lighting techniques; sometimes we combine them to achieve another level of realism.
It’s called Hybrid Lighting.
It was pretty exciting reading through it and learning a few tricks about lighting a scene freestyle. Which is probably how we start out anyway but at least now we do it with more knowledge about lighting, material and textures.
Chapter 9
Hybrid Lighting: Materials and Textures
This chapter is continuation of building an indoor scene. We started out with light and in this chapter we continue with materials and texture side by side with reference image as a guide.
REVIEW:BLENDER 3D 2.49 UPDATED. Architecture,Buildings and Scenery
This is an updated book version of Blender 2.49 Architecture,Buildings and Scenery by the same author Allan Brito with 343 pages.
Published by Packtpub Publishers.
It has been broken down to 15 chapters.
It’s been broken down into chapters that explain each stage of architectural modeling and expounds on each.
CHAPTER 1
This basically is an intro to architectural visualization and blender 3d.Architectural visualization is best explained as a previewing or showing something that yet exists. Represented using computer generated software from different angles if need be from the same project saving on time and money if we were to go the old fashioned way of technical drawings that was difficult to understand.
We get to understand the importance of detail in architectural visualization, as they make a whole lot of difference when it comes to achieving that level of realism desired of course together with a whole lot of things like lighting, texturing and going a step further and using external rendering systems like YafaRay. That’s where Blender 3D comes in:
Blender 3D is a 15MB open source software that is a very powerful tool in the hands of a skilled artist. Apart of of the mentioned facts concerning it, Blender 3D has been used to create whole 3D Movies like:
Elephant Dreams and Big Buck Bunny which can be downloaded from:
www.elephantsdream.org
www.bigbuckbunny.org
Pretty impressive for a 15MB open-source software.
Blender 3D can be run on different OS s:
- Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
- Mac OS X 10.3 and later
- Linux
- Iris 6.5 MIPS3
Has very minimal system requirements of course depending on the project undertaken.For simple projects that require minimal detail.These are it’s requirements:
- 3-button mouse
- OpenGL graphics card with 16MB RAM
- 300 MHZ CPU
- 128 MB RAM
- 1024 x 768 free hard disk space
For a maximum performance machine:
- 2GHz quad core CPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 1920 x 1200 pixels display with 24-bit color
- 3-button mouse
- OpenGL graphics card with 128 or 256 MB RAM
Blender 3d doesn’t function on it’s own.It requires other softwares like:
Gimp for post-rendering edits and also in the creating of textures.
CAD pretty much provides the technical drawing for modeling which is very precise.It saves you a lot of time.
Presentation process after editing also requires some tools. In this case Ink-space or OpenOffice.org Impress.
The book further goes on to explain the relation between a CAD software and Blender 3D, making use of libraries to avoid time consuming process of modeling objects instead of just importing from a library.
Here’s a list of sites where one can get free models for Blender 3D.
- http://resources.blogscopia.com — furniture models in the native
Blender file format.
- http://www.e-interiors.net — lots of pictures and free models of
furniture. Most files are in 3DS or DXF file formats.
- http://www.linedstudio.com — more furniture models and scenes already
in Blender native file format. - http://blender-archi.tuxfamily.org/Models — collection of models to use in Blender for architectural visualization. All are in the Blender native file format.
Blender has has some pretty impressive stuff in it’s gallery, to check them out….here’s the link:
WWW.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/art-gallery
The gallery is updated on a regular basis.
CHAPTER 2
Chapter 2 is quite basic and covers Blender interface.This chapter is for those who are not so familiar with Blender, for those who are familiar with it…..you can jump this chapter.
It explores Blender interface from windows, menus, selecting objects and what not.It basically takes you through how go about about familiarizing yourself with Blender.
CHAPTER 3
After familiarizing yourself with the Blender, in chapter 3 we learn the different aspects of architectural modeling and landscaping.
In Blender, we typically start with a cube.There are different types of objects in Blender like the curves,meta and surfaces.
Curves come in handy when modeling objects with curves, meta are sort clayish typically used in terrain modeling. Surfaces are best in landscape creation.
Coming back to meshes: We have planes, cube, circle,UV sphere, icosphere, cylinder, cone, grid, monkey and a torus.
Now ones commonly used are cubes, planes and circle in architectural modeling.
After having in mind what you want to make most commonly from a cube.We get into the mesh editing detail.To model something complex from a cube you need your way around a mesh editing tools in the menu named Mesh Tools in the editing panels.
In the process of modeling at some point comes the need for precise transformations.Which is possible in Blender. By holding down the control key on the keyboard and moving the mouse, we can use the grid lines as a guide and same applies for scaling and rotations.
We get to explore more tools used in editing like the looping tool that enables you to subdivide objects that would enable you create complex meshes.
We learn of merging of vertices, removing of double vertices. Extruding is major tool to creating new vertices and faces on an object. Extrusion can be done with vertices, faces and lines whichever suits the moment. It reaches a point where extrusion needs to be restricted to certain axis. By pressing either of the axis key,(x,y and z) this restricts transformation to that selected axis. Pretty helpful in some situations.We are given a pretty easy to understand illustration that helps describe this example.
After you are done with the basic concept of a modeled object, there’s times when you need to smoothen or create, maybe you need to create a building with several floors and the long way is pretty time consuming.That’s where modifiers come in.
Commonly used modifiers in architecture are array tool,boolean and subsurf. The subsurf tool smoothens models to desired levels, array modifier…creates copies of objects. In this case buildings with several floors will be done in an instant. Boolean tool gives more options to editing and creating complex meshes.
We further explore more modifier tools,working with groups to simply complex projects and proportional editing.
CHAPTER 4
Modeling for Architecture.
The previous chapters were like a big intro to the actual architectural modeling.
This chapter covers the creation of floors, walls, roofs and other elements.
But first,we just don’t get into it.Some very important point s are made clear about architecture that are vital for architectural modeling.
For one,we get a brief explanation on the differences between architectural modeling and other forms of modeling one of them being scales of models are usually big because buildings by nature are very big.
Another key aspect of architectural modeling is planning.Time is money and hence planning is everything.
Planning is done in two ways depending on who is the author of the project.A project in which you are the author and one that a client is the author.One in which you are the author,there’s freedom to change things as you go along and one in which the author is client,freedom is not there unless permitted by the client.
The book also goes on to explain the importance of modeling with precision by using the background grid as a guide.This is done by holding down the ctrl key while scaling,rotating or moving an object.Another option given is using edge length where the values or length of an edge is visible by activating it in edit mode.
Working with layers which helps in reorganizing your work and simplify what would otherwise be complex project.
We then get into actual practice. Brito starts with walls which really don’t have a specific way of modeling because of different needs in a project.
He further goes on to explain and show how to model rounded corners using simple easy to understand images which would otherwise be tricky, openings as in windows and doors and how to go about them as they can be a real headache if not thought through.
He further explores floors and ceilings, using CAD files that should be in DXF formats which is the only format that Blender can read.
CHAPTER 5
This chapter covers adding of detail to models..this as i said earlier plays a big role in achieving realism.Things like doors,windows,frames,door handles are pretty important.
He expounds on the making of windows having in mind the different kinds of windows like the double-hang sash window and skylight.One thing that stands out here is the using of measurements in the creating of a window so as to achieve the desired level of realism.The level of detail to be used is always determined by the location of the camera.A camera that is far away requires less detail on the object being modeled while that is close requires more detail.
Then he gets into doors…i have to admit,detail pretty much excites me.The explanation of windows and doors is pretty cool.
CHAPTER 6
After we are done with the building,windows and doors comes furniture that further increases the level of realism.
As explained,furniture can be classified into two categories, internal and external furniture.
Internal is for what occupies inside a building like beds,furniture and external cars,fence and fountains.Allan explains as to why detail is required in some aspects of modeling of furniture.
We get to learn the option of either using a library or modeling something yourself.For reference images and free models..these sites will be of importance:
We are shown how to append models from external libraries by going to File menu, and accessing the append or link option.A shortcut to that is Shift + F1.
He explains how to model a sofa and a chair which is actually quite simple and after all that you have achieved something that will add some level of realism to your project.
CHAPTER 7
After all the modeling is done comes materials.Chapter 7 covers how to create,organize and apply material to objects.Allan shows shows us how to go about doing that.
We need to have an understanding of how materials work in order to be able to achieve realism as well.Obviously that realism is achieved by understanding a lot of things as including materials.
What makes wood look like wooden surface and metal surface like a metallic surface? It’s all reflection.How light reflects on those surfaces.
An understanding of this will be big in 3d.
We get to explore working with colors, gradients, shaders which are used to determine how a material reacts with light.
Ray tracing is an option of achieving a reflected surface feel and of course these things models appear more realistic.
We learn how to create glass,,mirrors, glossy reflections ,retraced shadows and glossy transparency.
One thing i must mention is about wireframe.In architecture you might be required to represent a model in a structured manner for more understanding or to make a big impression and that’s where wireframes come in.In this mode one can see the structured form of a model hence understanding and explanation would be easier.
CHAPTER 8
Materials was the first stage and only contributed a certain level of realism.Textures…that’s where the magic is!.Textures are described in an understandable easy manner as image files of surfaces 0f real life objects like wood, stone, glass and what not.Considering that some of these surfaces can be difficult to find or you might have to buy spend a lot of time on the internet searching for them, libraries come in handy.Creating your own textures and storing them in your library will be of great advantage to you in the future projects because most them are commonly used over and over in different projects.
This book explains on the different kinds of texture in Blender. Procedural and non-Procedural textures and how they are used in Blender.We further learn about texture libraries, how to apply textures, mapping both the normal mapping and UV mapping.UV mapping is an elaborate way of placing textures in their exact locations.
Free textures websites:
www.cgtexture.com
www.blender-archi.tuxfamily.org/textures
Chapter 9 expounds on UV Mapping.
CHAPTER 10
This chapter is on lighting.LIGHTING!
You need to understand lighting well to be able to again get realistic results.Blender has different kinds of lights and all are unique to different environments. Brito tells of the different lights that Blender has and where to best use them.Whenever we have light there must be shadows, so how do you get soft shadows and how do you get sharp shadows, under what kind of lights.
We are given a small exercise that better explains how you understand this.
Chapter 11 goes on to delve into Advanced lighting based on two main techniques. Radiosity and Ambient occlusion and in what circumstances they are used.
CHAPTER 12
Chapter 12 is about YafaRay. An external renderer that has features that normal blender rendering machine does not have such global illumination and raytracing. YafaRay is really good when you want to go to the next level in renderings despite the downside of higher machine resources being consumed hence longer render times.
Allan take us through the installation of YafaRay how to run it with Blender simultaneously, understanding the YafaRay setup, materials used in YafaRay and render methods.
CHAPTER 13
So far all the chapters have covered Planning a project,modeling,handling materials and textures, and lighting.Chapter 14 is animation.Animation in architectural visualization most of the time means walk-throughs.
Just like a typical project you have to plan the animation process otherwise you might end up miscalculating the time set up for an animation buy either being less or just too much and by the time the rendering time is over after a couple of hours it will all be useless.
Allan explains the aspects involved in the process of animation like key frames, managing key frames, IPO curves and more.By the end of the chapter you should have a good understanding of animation in architecture.
CHAPTER 14
At this stage the project is done unless maybe after all that time it has taken to render you find a flaw in the rendered image.Then what…..Gimp.Its an editing software for images that would be a really big help in terms adjusting the rendered images and also creation of textures.
This chapter explores Gimp.
CHAPTER 15
So far we have been operating on Blender 3D 2.49b.Chapter 15 is about Blender 3D 2.50, a new version of Blender.It’s out already but i doubt a lot have used it much including me.It’s interface is different from the other Blender versions so you need to be shown around to know where what is but the shortcuts are pretty much the same.
We are told on how to manage windows in 2.5,how to go around modeling in the version.I have to admit i had to sweat a bit to get to know how to create models like a cube a plane and what not, i have to remind myself from time to time.
The differences between Blender 2.5 and 2.49b are pretty clear once you go through this chapter or if you already have, apart from the obvious interface…which is pretty cool.I like this one better, it’s more welcoming and you get that interest in learning it.
An area with many changes is deformations and animation,where anything can practically be animated.
DIFFERENCES
After going through the book,there’s little difference from this book and the previous one.The cover itself is pretty much the same as the other one and i mistook it for being the same book as the other one hence giving someone the assumption that there’s nothing new to learn.
For those who have read the first book,you probably already understand what wasn’t covered in the previous book.I’d say this book is for those who want to learn and understand architecture and haven’t read the first book. There’s added information about architecture that is vital to understanding architecture,buildings and scenery.
Blender 3D 2.49 Scripting Book Review
- Blender made movie “Elephants Dream”
Blender 2.49 Scripting
Personally I have been searching for books and tutorials online and anywhere I can on scripting…Finally I have found one.
Blender 2.49 Scripting is another Packt Publishing Book. It’s written by Michael Anders, a guy who studied Chemistry and Physics. You would never guess that he would write a book on Blender especially scripting although he admits to being naïve about blender.
The book has 269 pages and divided into 9 chapters.
CHAPTER 1
In this chapter we explore how to use in-built blender and python in scripting. Questions such as:
• How to use built in Blender
• Writing a simple script that adds an object onto a scene.
• How to register a script.
We get a brief description of how to use basic scripting in blender and using tools that I am sure many have wondered about.
• There is a continuous exploration on modules.
• Familiarizing yourself with the built in editor.
• Integrating a script into blenders’ menus/help system.
• Adding different kinds of objects into a scene.
CHAPTER 2
We get to learn how to create creepy crawls from an application that you are shown how to make. There’s nothing I enjoy more than building something from scratch and in this section we get to learn to do that.
We get a step by step process of creating body parts of crawling creatures.
What excited me also was the adaptability of blender to many functions when using scripting. I have always wondered how 3d bar charts were made and animated and I found my answer here:
We import a spreadsheet in csv format and then automating the creating and rendering of the bar chart and a detailed process is explained on how to arrive at an automated bar chart. I got to admit that I barely understood what I was looking at but then again it’s not a one night lesson. After taking a shot at it a number of times I’ll get somewhere.
The whole book looks like algebra if you were to scroll through it fast and if you never liked math in high school you might feel a bit …….aarrggghhhh. Take a closer look… it’s not algebra.
On many occasions blender is used in Architectural visualization although it’s not really a CAD program. I use it too for that. After giving up on character modeling because I am just too impatient, architectural modeling just took my time instead… [It’s funny, I can spend hours on a building but even an hour on a character is just too much for me]
CHAPTER 3
This chapter delves into vertices and how to ease your work of dealing with large numbers of vertices by assigning them to vertex groups and exploring the different areas where vertex groups can be applied like in dealing with armatures and modifiers and also applying color and materials to different vertex groups and leaving others. The explanation is pretty straight forward despite the fact that it’s scripting we are learning here and we have examples to help us along understand the different segments in a chapter in the whole book.
Modifiers can and cannot be affected or used together with modifiers:
Displacement modifier can work with vertex groups but Array modifier cannot work with vertex groups.
The chapter goes on to cover engraving text onto a mesh and converting the whole thing after engraving to mesh and also a simple rigging experiment of a clock.
CHAPTER 4
This chapter is about defining complex relationships between animated objects by using py-drivers. We learn how to define constraints that may be used just like the built-in constraints.
Blender being a complex system, we are made to understand the concepts involved in python scripting.
Understanding: IPOs
Constraints and the differences between the drivers.
Programming with Constraints and IPOs.
Pydrivers and Pyconstraints.
CHAPTER 5
Acting on frame changes, as in setting up scripts to run automatically after certain occasions…I got more and more excited as I moved from chapter to chapter. The idea of making something appear or disappear in 3d without enlisting the hell of aftereffects or other effects programmes is pretty cool. We are given an example of fading an object from black to white.
CHAPTER 6
Chapter 6 is about shapes, keys, IPOs and curves….we explore:
Defining of IPOs
Defining shape keys on a mesh
Defining IPOs for those shape keys
Pose armatures
Group changes in poses into actions-we are given an example of a cartoon character swallowing food and the peristaltic movements that follow. It would be hard to achieve that by simply using shape keys….so how do you do it?
One exciting segment covered is about synching keys to sound that I learned to do in 3dmax but didn’t know how in my adopted software. How to make speakers reverberate according to the music.
CHAPTER 7
In most occasions I have had difficulty achieving the level of texturing that I want although in most occasions good results are still achieved. In advanced level of texturing of using nodes…pretty cool stuff if you know what you are doing because you have complete control over the textures. Here we have Pynodes….we basically use scripting to achieve the level of texturing desired.
In this chapter we learn:
How to write Pynodes that create simple color patterns.
Writing Pynodes that produce patterns with normals.
Writing animated Pynodes.
Writing height and slope dependent materials.
Writing to create shaders that react to the angle of incident light.
We explore how to form realistic rain patterns, ripples, bubbles.
Exciting stuff!!
CHAPTER 8
Chapter 8 is basically about rendering and image manipulation. Rendering here is automated. You can render individual and frames as well as animations and this would save what would otherwise be tedious work. Cameras have been a bit difficult for me at least when it comes to getting that right angle…I spend a lot of time trying to get that right angle and it’s stressful. We get to learn how to render something using scripting from different views and combining all the views into one image using blender’s image manipulation capabilities and an external module called PIL [Python Imaging Library].
As we move along, we come across rendering Billboards.
Billboards are a technique used to apply a picture of a complex object onto a simple object such as a single square face and replicating the object as many times as needed. This technique is fairly easy to learn and saves a lot of rendering time and the results will be fairly realistic depending on where the objects are placed preferably in far or middle distance.
CHAPTER 9
Expanding your Toolset…..this chapter is basically about making it easier for a learner to understand Blender Scripting. The chapter covers:
• Listing and archiving assets such as image maps- Images textures that are no longer in use can be archived and stored in a zip file creating order in your system.
• Publishing rendered images using FTP [File Transfer Protocol] – Meaning we can save a rendered image in a remote server and remembers the server name and [optionally] the password.
• Extending the functionality of the built-in editor with regular expression searches
• Speed up computations by using Psyco- A just-in-time compiler
• Adding version control to your scripts with subversion.
This book won’t be complete without information on where to go to get information on relevant Blender subjects. We get useful tips on how to go about getting information from the internet and forums about Blender. Most questions asked have been asked before and searching forum archives or the web extensively will get you he answers required because in some occasions some questions are not answered because they have been covered before.
Below are links provided in the book?
General Blender-related forums and blogs
Blender’s home page is an important source of information and the following pages should be considered a must read:
• www.blender.org: The home page with news on Blender developments.
• wiki.blender.org: The wiki that contains the manual, tutorials, and links to resources.
Some general Blender-related forums are worth noticing as they attract the attention of a large part of the Blender community:
• www.blendernation.com: This site tries to be the central hub of all Blender-related news and succeeds quite well at it. Its RSS feed is a useful addition to your browser navigation bar to stay up-to-date.
Python programming
This section lists some general Python-related resources. Blender scripting resources are listed in the next section.
• www.python.org: It’s the main site and very well organized, nevertheless some main sections deserve to be mentioned separately here.
• www.python.org/download/: Download your full Python distribution here if you do not already have it installed or if the installed version doesn’t match Blender’s built-in version exactly.
For newcomers and seasoned programmers alike, the following pages offer some useful tutorials on Python in general and some ‘how-tos’ on specific subjects. All the articles on these pages have a fairly low learning curve:
• docs.python.org/tutorial: It is especially worth reading for people experienced in other programming languages who want to learn Python. It covers most Python-related issues and should be sufficient for most people to get started with Python.
• docs.python.org/howto: Detailed information on subjects such as regular expressions, Internet programming, and Python style.
Blender scripting
Specific information on Blender scripting is readily available too.
• http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Extensions/Python: Gives important information on how to install and use Python with Blender on different platforms and includes information on the built-in editor.
• http://www.blender.org/documentation/249PythonDoc/: The official documentation of Blender’s Python API. This is the page we refer to in this book when we mention “the API documentation”. Before you start scripting, read this at least twice from start to finish. It will give you an excellent overview of what is possible and by reading it completely, you will find it easier to find something when you need the information.
• wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:Py/Scripts: A catalog of the many, many scripts available for Blender, both the bundled ones and the additional ones people have written. Before trying to invent something on your own, check to see if someone already invented it for you.
• www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man/: The Blender Python API also gives access to many OpenGL functions to draw things directly on screen. The API documentation refers to these pages for detailed information. OpenGL is not a subject taken up lightly so you might want to check some tutorials first if you want to get fancy. http://www.opengl.org/code/ lists some entries that might give a start.
OVERVIEW
The book has no grammatical errors as far as I am concerned and explanation on matters are straight forward meaning one can understand it with time or after research on the same somewhere else. And the fact that relevant links concerning different aspects of Blender have been provided.
The information on Blender 2.5 and Python was helpful.
GOOD READ!
Is Animation the Right Career Option for you?
I came across this piece of information from http://www.bestofmultiplex.com/animation/2009/Post/8/is-animation-right-career-option-for-you.html and found it informative to help some potential animators to make informed decisions about their careers.
Animation the most glamorous career of today: Animation is becoming most demanding career option for today’s youngsters and why it shouldn’t be? It has everything which every young professional wants to have. It has glamour, it has fame, it has money I mean it has everything which a young mind dream to have but the big question is-is animation rightcareer option for you?
Don’t follow anything blindly because of just shiny advertisement or suggestions by your neighbor or friends. Before moving anywhere or choosing anycareer option do study about yourself and find out the things that are you really eligible for that career or not? Do you comply the requirements of that career? Note down the things in which you are good and in which you are bad? What affectionate you most and what scares you lot.
Here are few guidelines which every fresher or new animation students must read before going to choose animation as a career.
HOW TO BECOME AN ANIMATOR
Research about schools, colleges, universities or animation institutes and interview them about their curriculum, their faculty, their teachers, their students, the work that they create and what type of placement assistance they provide to animation students looking for jobs.
Find out what is the job placement rate of that animation institute or animation school or animation college.
Clarify your professional and personal goals that what types of projects would you like to be working on? What type of work would give you the most satisfaction? Are you interested in developing your artistic skill or technical skills are just fine for you.
Animation is a strong and rapidly developing sector. You can make your career in animation by working in various fields such as…
- Electronic Entertainment (Gaming)
- Broadcast or Film Industry and
- Professional Visualizations
In detail you can make your career in animation as
3D Animator
Character Animator
Character FX Artist (Hair/Cloth/Fur)
Lighting Artist or Lighting Supervisors
Matte Painters
3D Modelers
Renderers
Roto Artist
Storyboard Artist
Art Director
Animation Director
Animator
CG Supervisor
Character Designer
Hair and Cloth Simulation Artist
Compositor
Concept Artist
Creative Director
Effects Director or Supervisor
Environment Designer
Fur / VFX Artist
Layout Artists
Technical Director
Modeling Supervisors
Modeling Technical Directors
Producer
Rigging Artists
Rigging Supervisor
Rigging TD (Technical Directors)
Shading TD
Texture Artist
Texture Supervisors
Game Programmer
Video Game Technical Director
Video Game Producer
Video Game Engineer
Designer
Game Artist
Visual Effects Supervisor
Visual Effects Artist
Water/Flame/Smoke Artists
But the important factor is you have to decide yourself that what you want to do and which one is right career for you? You can do it or not? Do art affectionate you or just it is fine for you. Seriously if you are not an art lover, you are not interested in art or you don’t like team work or you are not a good team player then forget about all these things animation is not acareer option for you, but if you like art, you love to do it, you love artists or artist work then definitely animation is right career for you.
Now if you have made your mind to choose animation as your career then create plan for your career specialization, research schools and institutes to find the best fit for you.
Understand the types of jobs available in the animation industry and what skills are necessary to get them. Find the type of job that is the best match for your interest and talents.
Nowadays there are many software being used in animation industry such as
Autodesk Maya, 3D Studio Max, Adobe Photoshop, After Effects,Renderman, Softimage XSI, Fusion etc.
There are many great websites and publications available nowadays to learn about art of animation and animation industry. Some suggested reading and references are…
1. Animators survival kit by Richard Williams
2. The complete Animation Course: The Principles, Practice and Techniques of successful animation by Chris Patmore.
3. The Illusion of life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston
4. Treasures of Disney Animation Art by John Canemaker
5. Character Animation Crash Course by Eric Goldberg
6. The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expression by Gary Faigin
7. Atlas of Human Anatomy of the Artist by Stephen Rogers Peck
8. An Atlas of Animal Anatomy for Artists by W. Ellenberger, H. Baum, Lewis S. Brown and H. Dittrich
9. The Male and Female figure in motion: 60 Classic Photographic Sequences by Eadweard Muybridge
10. Animal in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge.
11. Acting for Animators: A Complete Guide to Performance Animation by Ed Hooks
12. Digital Compositing for Film and Video, Second Edition by Steve Wright
13. 3D Human Modeling and Animation by Peter Ratner
14. The Art of Maya by Alias Wavefront
15. Maya Character Animation by Jae-iin Choi
16. Visual Effects in a Digital World: A Comprehensive Glossary of over 7,000 Visual Effects Term by Karen Goulekas
17. Techniques of Special Effects of Cinematography by Raymond Fielding
18. Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 most powerful film conventions every film maker must know by Jennifer Van Sijll
19. On Directing Film by David Mamet.
Except all these there are many useful websites and blog available nowadays providing information regarding art of animation and animation industry. Which you can find easily by using your common sense even such of them are providing completely free animation tutorials, Visual Effects Techniques, Special Effects Techniques, News and lot more stuff. But the condition is how much you apply your skills to find out all of them.
Book Review: Architecture, Buildings and Scenery
Book Review: Architecture, Buildings and Scenery.
by Chepkech Kevin
This is another of Allan Brito’s books’, a little over 300 pages with 14 chapters (published by Packtpub Publishers)
I was really excited about this book and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.
I have to admit my expectation of this book was totally different from what I got. What it does, is expound on important things to consider in the art of 3D Architecture, Buildings and Scenery.
Chapter 1
This chapter is an intro to Blender and its software and hardware requirements which I wrote in my previous book review. This being a book about Architecture, Allan shows us how to work with files from CAD software such as AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, QCAD and other tools. Sometimes there’s never enough time to work on something and we have to retrieve already completed models mostly of furniture from a previous project or go through the internet to looks for them. Some of the sites that provide free models are:
http://resources.blogscopia.com: Furniture models in the native Blender file format.
http://www.e-interiors.net: Lots of pictures and free models of furniture. Most files are in 3DS or DXF file formats.
http://www.linedstudio.com: More furniture models and scenes already in Blender native file format.
http://blender-archi.tuxfamily.org/Models: A collection of models to be used in Blender for Architectural Visualization, all in the Blender native file format.
Chapter2-3
In these chapters, Allan explains on the workings of Blender, its interface and its tools from merging windows to using modifiers such as the array modifier in architecture.
Chapter 4-6
This chapter focuses on modeling. When it comes to modeling other things not related to architecture like cars, characters and what have you there’s no pressure of precision modeling unlike when dealing with architecture modeling. Well, Allan explains how to go about getting the right and precise dimensions of models. It’s really cool to discover new things that you didn’t know about blender. He gives short examples to practice with.
Chapter 7-9
We learn how to add materials, textures and UV mapping when there is need for more control over the texture.
Chapter 10-12
Proper lighting can make a big difference in a virtual scenario or architectural model. A good lighting setup is the key which doesn’t come easy but with enough practice very much possible.
Knowing and understanding the different lamps in blender will greatly enable you to know which lamp is suitable for which scenario or model. In these chapters we get to learn about radiosity and ambient occlusion, global illumination with YafaRay.
Chapter 13-14
So far it has been about still images but there is also animation. Animation in Architecture can make a strong impression to any person especially when selling your portfolio to a potential employer or marketing of a project. Blender has what other 3D software’s and that is interactive animation made possible with the Blender Game Engine.
As you read along, you will get to learn how to plan, set up key frames and manage them, edit animations with IPO curves.
One more thing that excited me was the video sequence editor in-built in blender. It allows us to edit and merge video files without the need of video editing software. There is more to learn about the sequencer (video sequencer editor) and animation process as you go along.
The post production process can be frustrating especially when the rendering process took so many hours ad the final result is not what you expected. This is where Gimp comes in. The brightness or color can always be adjusted with Gimp. You will get to learn more about Gimp and how much it improves a rendered result saving a lot time of adjusting the rendering engine.
This book is for those into architecture like me.Those into something else, sorry….this book isn’t for you.
Book Review:Incredible Machines
Book Review: Blender3d_Incredible Machines
By Chepkech Kevin
Incredible Machines is a 303 page book written by Allan Brito and published by Packtpub Publishers (packtpub.com).He has written two others books, Blender3d: Architecture, Buildings and Scenery and Blender3d-Guia do Usuario. He covers the use of Blender and other tools for architectural visualization at his website http://www.blender3darchitect.com where he can be reached.
From the name, the book’s about making of machines, sci-fi not of this world unless maybe in your imagination. He covers modeling, rendering and animation of these machines and all the steps that lead to its completion such as UV mapping, dealing with particles and their animation, using curves and so forth. It covers three different projects starting with the most simple to a more complex one (transforming a robot).
This book is for game developers, 3d artists and product designers who strive for realistic images, 3D models and videos and also for those interested in creating realistic models using YafaRay and LuxRender.
Blender3d 2.49 is the version used in this book and some of minimum requirements given are:
Minimum requirements:
Three-button mouse
Open GL Graphics Card with 16 MB RAM
300 MHz CPU
128 MB RAM
1024 x 768 pixels display with 16-bit color
20 MB free hard disk space
However, if you really want to get maximum performance, there is a more powerful configuration:
Three-button mouse
Open GL Graphics Card with 128 or 256 MB RAM
2 GHz dual core CPU
2 GB RAM
1920 x 1200 pixels display with 24-bit color.
There isn’t much to say about the software, only that you can run Blender on almost any operating system available. The following is the list of systems that support Blender:
Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, or Vista
Mac OS X 10.2 and later
Linux i386, x86_64/amd64 or PPC
FreeBSD 6.2 i386 and later
Irix 6.5 mips3
Solaris 2.8 sparc.
Chapter one of the book gives a brief history of blender, where and how to get it. Blender is an open source software available for free at the blender foundation website http://www.blender.org .It goes on to introduce other applications that run hand in hand with blender like YafaRay (http://www.yafaray.org) and gimp (http://www.gimp.org) which are also available for free from their respective websites.
He goes on to introduce incredible machines, what it means and how the name came about and how he has organized the book to tackle the three projects extensively.
Chapter two to five
Deals with the first project. There’s a brief explanation on why he chose that particular object as the fisrt project and the workflow for modeling it. He uses subdivision modeling but he explains why not polygon modeling and also tells us of other modeling techniques such as nurbs modeling and spline modeling and where they are suitable. I found the language to be an easy read and straight to the point. He introduces tools used to add detail such as:
How to use hooks in the alignment of objects
Spin tool to close up an object
Adding creases and rounded details
And finally using YafaRay to create an environment and setting up lights and adding materials to achieve that ultimate realism.
Chapter 6to 10
This is the second project bit more complex than the first one. He again gives the project workflow and goes ahead to model the object. Start by making the general shape of the machine and later on adding detail in such a way that you can’ miss anything. He uses curves to add cables and wires to the machine (I was so jazzed by this).
He tackles uv mapping and the use of blender particles.
In the rendering of the machine he further expounds on the use YafaRay and creates an impressive environment for the spacecraft as well as material.
Chapter 11 to 16
I have got to admit that I expected like a lesson on how to transform Optimus Prime from a truck to machine but that’s not what I got. If I did get that then I probably would be lost right now because it requires a lot of detail. Once I understand this fully then I would be in a position to give Optimus a try.
This is the most complex of all the machines and Allan begins by telling us what it is and how he goes about tackling it. The challenges ahead from textures and materials to animating it. In this last project he uses LuxRender instead and expounds on the pros and cons of LuxRender as compared to YafaRay and why he used LuxRender this time.
As he adds detail to the machine I got to discover functions of some modifiers I didn’t know what they did like the array modifier. He provides valuable information concerning LuxRender from where to find it (http://www.luxrender.net), and the process of installing it. I got to learn new things concerning an unbiased render engine.
I found the chapter on animating the robot long and boring, I have to admit animation isn’t one of my strong points being an impatient person I’d like to see fast results but from those long tutorials I have followed through up to the end have been worth it. The knowledge gained is very vital, the same with this chapter. He uses hierarchies, controllers, armatures and helpers. One of the functions of LuxRender is it can be used to edit and fine-tune an image within LuxRender which is so cool and afterwords using gimp to clean and remove the noise on rendered images.
Mistakes
There were a few grammatical errors although I got what the message it would be unfortunate for someone who wouldn’t and probably miss something important.
General Overview
I found it pretty good and straight forward. Aspiring game developers and 3d artists will find this a book a good stepping stone to learning the first steps of game animation and achieving the perfect realism using the different render engines.
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