3D Character Rigging in Blender. Bring your characters to life through rigging and make them animation-ready

Jaime Kelly

In the intricate world of 3D character rigging with Blender, aspiring artists often find themselves grappling with the daunting challenge of achieving results akin to seasoned professionals. This book is your guide to overcoming that very challenge, providing you with the necessary knowledge and skills to excel in this complex art form.As you embark on this creative journey, this book will guide you through a carefully crafted flow. Beginning with the basics, the first part of the book will teach you how to add structure to an empty canvas and master the art of weight painting in Blender. You'll delve into the intricacies of rigging humanoid characters, gain a deep understanding of the essential buttons and techniques, and discover invaluable success-boosting tips.Starting with simple mesh deformation using a single bone, you'll progress steadily toward the mastery of fully rigging a human character, all while comprehending the reasons behind each step in the process. Furthermore, the book leaves you with a selection of advanced techniques, fully explained, paving the way for a natural progression in your artistic journey and allowing you to continuously refine and enhance your skills.By the end of the book, you'll excel at crafting character rigs, seamlessly meeting professional pipeline demands in diverse teams and studios.

3D Deep Learning with Python. Design and develop your computer vision model with 3D data using PyTorch3D and more

Xudong Ma, Vishakh Hegde, Lilit Yolyan

With this hands-on guide to 3D deep learning, developers working with 3D computer vision will be able to put their knowledge to work and get up and running in no time.Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, this book lets you explore and gain a thorough understanding of state-of-the-art 3D deep learning. You’ll see how to use PyTorch3D for basic 3D mesh and point cloud data processing, including loading and saving ply and obj files, projecting 3D points into camera coordination using perspective camera models or orthographic camera models, rendering point clouds and meshes to images, and much more. As you implement some of the latest 3D deep learning algorithms, such as differential rendering, Nerf, synsin, and mesh RCNN, you’ll realize how coding for these deep learning models becomes easier using the PyTorch3D library.By the end of this deep learning book, you’ll be ready to implement your own 3D deep learning models confidently.

3D Environment Design with Blender. Enhance your modeling, texturing, and lighting skills to create realistic 3D scenes

Abdelilah Hamdani, Carlos Barreto

Blender is a powerful tool for creating all kinds of visual assets, but with such power comes complexity. Creating a photorealistic 3D scene seems like a Herculean task for more than 90% of 3D designers, but don’t be discouraged! 3D Environment Design with Blender will get you up and running.This practical guide helps reduce the complexity of 3D environment design, advance your Blender skills, and produce lifelike scenes and animations in a time-efficient manner. You'll start by learning how to fix the most common mistakes 3D designers make with modeling and scale matching that stop them from achieving photorealism. Next, you’ll understand the basics of realistic texturing, efficient unwrapping and achieving photorealistic lighting by turning an actual reference of a wood cabin into a realistic 3D scene. These skills will be used and expanded as you build a realistic 3D environment with natural assets and materials that you’ll create from scratch. Once you’ve developed your natural environment, you’ll advance to creating realistic render shots by applying cool camera features, and compositing tricks that will make your final render look photorealistic and pleasing to the eye.By the end of this book, you'll be able to implement modeling tricks and best practices to make your 3D environments look stunningly lifelike.

3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender. Combine the powerful UE4 with Blender to create visually appealing and comprehensive game environments

Jessica Plowman

Unreal Engine 4 now has support for Blender, which was not available in earlier versions. This has opened up new possibilities and that is where this book comes in. This is the first book in the market combining these two powerful game and graphic engines. Readers will build an amazing high-level game environment with UE4 and will show them how to use the power of Blender 3D to create stunning animations and 3D effects for their game. This book will start with creating levels, 3D assets for the game, game progression, light and environment control, animation, and so on. Then it will teach readers to add amazing visual effects to their game by applying rendering, lighting, rigging, and compositing techniques in Blender. Finally, readers will learn how to smoothly transfer blender files to UE4 and animate the game assets. Each chapter will add complexities to the game environment.

3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3: Beginner's Guide. A practical guide to creating real-time responsive online 3D games in Silverlight 3 using C#, XBAP WPF, XAML, Balder, and Farseer Physics Engine

Gaston C. Hillar

Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plug-in that enables the animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. Silverlight is a great (and growing) RIA platform and games are the next level to exploit in it. But it doesn't offer 3D capabilities out of the box and integrating a 3D engine can involve lot of complex mathematics and matrix algebra. This book will help C# developers to get their fingers on the pulse of 3D in Silverlight.This book uses Balder, an open source 3D engine offering 3D capabilities for Silverlight 3. It leaves out boring matrix algebra and complex 3D mathematics. By the end of the book you will have explored the entire engine, and will be able to design and program your own 3D games with ease!The book begins by introducing you to the fundamental concepts of 2D games and then drives you into the 3D world, using easy-to-follow, step-by-step examples. The book employs amazing graphics and impressive performance, and increasingly adds more features to a 3D game giving you a rich interactive experience.By following the practical examples in this book, you will learn the important concepts, from the creation of the initial models, up to the addition of physics and artificial intelligence.The book helps you to provide realistic behaviors for 3D characters by enveloping models with different textures, using lights to create effects, animating multiple 3D characters using a physics engine (Farseer Physics Engine), and simulating real-life physics. Videos, music, and sounds associated with specific events offer the final touches to the 3D game development learning experience.

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook. A comprehensive guide to exploring rendering algorithms in modern OpenGL and Vulkan

Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov

OpenGL is a popular cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics, while Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics API that targets high-performance applications. 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook helps you learn about modern graphics rendering algorithms and techniques using C++ programming along with OpenGL and Vulkan APIs.The book begins by setting up a development environment and takes you through the steps involved in building a 3D rendering engine with the help of basic, yet self-contained, recipes. Each recipe will enable you to incrementally add features to your codebase and show you how to integrate different 3D rendering techniques and algorithms into one large project. You'll also get to grips with core techniques such as physically based rendering, image-based rendering, and CPU/GPU geometry culling, to name a few. As you advance, you'll explore common techniques and solutions that will help you to work with large datasets for 2D and 3D rendering. Finally, you'll discover how to apply optimization techniques to build performant and feature-rich graphics applications.By the end of this 3D rendering book, you'll have gained an improved understanding of best practices used in modern graphics APIs and be able to create fast and versatile 3D rendering frameworks.

3D Printing Blueprints. Using the free open-source Blender software, anyone can design models for 3D printing. Fantastic fun and a great experience whether or not you have a 3D printer, this book is a crash course in the new technology

Joe Larson

A new industrial age is here. Machines designed to build useful and interesting objects have moved from the factory to the home. Whether you have a 3D printer or not, learning how to design your first 3D models is the best way to become part of the 3D printing movement. 3D Printing Blueprints will teach you, step by step, the tools and techniques of using Blender, a free 3D modelling program, to build 3D models for printing with simple and fun hands-on projects.3D Printing Blueprints uses engaging and fun projects that teach Blender modeling for 3D printing through hands-on lessons. First you'll learn basic modeling and make a small simple object. Then each new project brings with it new tools and techniques as well as teaching the rules of 3D printing design. Eventually you'll be building objects designed to repair or replace everyday objects. Finally you'll be able to even tackle other people's models and fix them to be 3D printable.Through the course of doing the blueprints you will custom build one-of-a-kind objects that you can call your own. Starting from a custom vase formed from a picture, lessons will progress to a multi-part modular robot toy. Then simple machines will be designed with custom gears and functions. Eventually you'll learn how to download models from the Internet and make custom objects. Finally you'll be able to build models with near real life specifications and make a print that can be used for small object repair.3D Printing Blueprints will teach you everything you need to know about building custom 3D models to print successfully on modern home 3D printers.

3D Printing Designs: Design an SD Card Holder. Measurement basics to design and build a 3D printed object

Joe Larson

Want to model a 3D printed prototype of an object that needs to be replaced or broken? This book will teach you how to accurately measure objects in the real world with a few basic measuring techniques and how to create an object for 3D printing around the objects measured. In this book, you'll learn to identify basic shapes from a given object, use Vernier and Digital calipers and grid paper tracing techniques to derive measurements for the objects. With the help of measurements, you'll see to model these objects using Blender, organize the parts into layers, and later combine them to create the desired object, which in this book is a 3D printable SD card holder ring that fits your finger.