Reimagining Characters with Unreal Engine's MetaHuman Creator. Elevate your films with cinema-quality character designs and motion capture animation

Brian Rossney, Ciaran Kavanagh

MetaHuman Creator (MHC) is an online, user-friendly 3D design tool for creating highly realistic digital humans that can be animated within Unreal Engine (UE) and enhanced with motion capture technology. This means that filmmakers and game developers now have access to a high quality, affordable solution that was previously only available to specialist studios.This book will focus on using UE5 and MHC from a filmmaker angle. Firstly, you’ll understand how to use the online MHC to create a digital character, changing its facial structure, body type, and clothing. After that, you’ll learn all the necessary steps to bring the character into UE5 and set it up for animation. Then, using an iPhone and a webcam to capture face and body movements, you’ll mix these motion capture files, refine the animations using the MetaHuman Control Rig, and save these takes to be reused and edited again within the Level Sequencer. On top of that, you’ll learn how to create a rendered video file for film production using both the Level Sequencer and a VR Cinematic Camera. By the end of this book, you’ll have created your own MetaHuman character, as well as face and body motion capture data, and learned the necessary skills to give your future projects further realism and creative control.

Working Smarter with Microsoft Project. Implement effective project control techniques to maximize efficiency and drive successful outcomes

Staci Warne

Project management is filled with various challenges, such as managing unforeseen risks, balancing priorities, and shifting project scopes, which can lead to inefficiencies. This definitive guide leverages the author’s 25+ years of industry experience to take you on a hands-on journey to unlock your full potential with Microsoft Project.This book helps you grasp the fundamental aspects of project creation, before moving on to more advanced topics, covering tracking, maintenance, and collaborative aspects for any project. You’ll find out how to track progress, optimize schedules, manage budgets, and customize reports based on business requirements by using easy-to-follow instructions and illustrations. The book taps into the author’s extensive experience as a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and Project Management Professional (PMP) to provide you with invaluable insights into managing resource overallocations, mastering advanced resource management techniques, and seamlessly integrating Microsoft Project with other tools to boost productivity and achieve success with your projects.By the end of this Microsoft Project book, you’ll be able to create professional project plans, execute projects with confidence, and consistently achieve your desired outcomes.

Supercharging Productivity with Trello. Harness Trello’s powerful features to boost productivity and team collaboration

Brittany Joiner

Managing large projects and teams can be an immense challenge, but having an efficient project management system can make all the difference. Trello is one of the leading project management systems, however, it’s crucial to understand its features to leverage its full potential Supercharging Productivity with Trello is the perfect guide for you to enhance efficiency and do more in less time. You’ll start by exploring Trello's structure, including cards, boards, and lists, before diving into Trello card basics. Next, you’ll learn to use Trello views and templates to aggregate tasks and organize projects. You’ll then explore automation, including triggers and actions, to create powerful workflows that will help you prioritize tasks and organize your data effectively. Later, you’ll discover Power-Ups, an add-on that extends Trello's functionality. Throughout the book, you’ll find practical tips and real-world examples to gain practical knowledge. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to use Trello effectively for task and project management helping you stay on top of your game and deliver quick wins in no time.

Visualforce Development Cookbook. Upgrade Your Development Skills - Second Edition

Keir Bowden

Visualforce is a framework that allows developers to build sophisticated, custom user interfaces that can be hosted natively on the Force.com platform. The Visualforce framework includes a tag-based markup language, similar to HTML that is used to write the Visualforce pages and a set of controllers that are used to write business logic to the Visualforce pages. Visualforce Development Cookbook provides solutions to a variety of challenges faced by Salesforce developers and demonstrates how easy it is to build rich, interactive pages using Visualforce. Whether you are looking to make a minor addition to the standard page functionality or override it completely, this book will provide you with the help you require throughout. You will start by learning about the simple utilities and will build up to more advanced techniques for data visualization and to reuse functionality. You will learn how to perform various tasks such as creating multiple records from a single page, visualizing data as charts, using JavaScript to enhance client-side functionality, building a public website, and making data available to a mobile device. With an interesting chapter on tackling common issues faced while developing Visualforce pages, the book provides lots of practical examples to enhance and extend your Salesforce user interface.

Mastering QGIS. Go beyond the basics and unleash the full power of QGIS with practical, step-by-step examples - Second Edition

Kurt Menke, GISP, Richard Smith Jr., GISP, ...

QGIS is an open source solution to GIS. It is widely used by GIS professionals all over the world. It is the leading alternative to the proprietary GIS software. Although QGIS is described as intuitive, it is also by default complex. Knowing which tools to use and how to apply them is essential to producing valuable deliverables on time.Starting with a refresher on the QGIS basics, this book will take you all the way through to creating your first custom QGIS plugin. From the refresher, we will recap how to create, populate, and manage a spatial database. You’ll also walk through styling GIS data, from creating custom symbols and color ramps to using blending modes. In the next section, you will discover how to prepare vector, heat maps, and create live layer effects, labeling, and raster data for processing. You’ll also discover advanced data creation and editing techniques. The last third of the book covers the more technical aspects of QGIS such as using LAStools and GRASS GIS’s integration with the Processing Toolbox, how to automate workflows with batch processing, and how to create graphical models. Finally, you will see how to create and run Python data processing scripts and write your own QGIS plugin with pyqgis. By the end of the book, you will understand how to work with all the aspects of QGIS, and will be ready to use it for any type of GIS work.

Expert Delphi. Robust and fast cross-platform application development - Second Edition

Marco Cantu, Paweł Głowacki, Stephen Ball

Master Delphi, the most powerful Object Pascal IDE and versatile component library for cross-platform native app development, by harnessing its capabilities for building natively compiled, blazingly fast apps for all major platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux.Expert Delphi begins with a quick overview of Delphi, helping you get acquainted with the IDE and the Object Pascal language. The book then quickly progresses to more advanced concepts, followed by the architecture of applications and the FireMonkey library, guiding you through building server-side services, parallel programming, and database access. Toward the end, you’ll learn how to integrate your app with various web services and deploy them effectively.By the end of this book, you’ll be adept at building powerful, cross-platform, native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS—all from a single code base.

ChatGPT for Accelerating Salesforce Development. Achieve faster, smarter, and more cost-effective Salesforce Delivery with ChatGPT

Andy Forbes, Philip Safir, Joseph Kubon, Francisco Fálder

Authored by a team of Salesforce masters with exemplary IT background, ChatGPT for Salesforce Development helps you learn about the intricacies of Salesforce design, configuration, coding, and testing, demonstrating how ChatGPT can simplify complex setups and enhance project team efficiency.With this book, you’ll unlock the effective use of ChatGPT for crafting user stories that align seamlessly with project goals, learn how to design and implement Salesforce flows, and quickly write clear, comprehensive, and high-quality project documentation. You’ll leverage ChatGPT to write new Apex code, decipher existing code, and explore the development of web services and callouts. This book covers everything from trigger creation to the development of Lightning Web Components (LWC), highlighting how these can accelerate the development process. Applying ChatGPT's debugging capabilities, you’ll swiftly identify and resolve Salesforce issues to uphold the integrity and performance of your Salesforce applications.By the end of this book, you’ll be adept at integrating ChatGPT at every stage of Salesforce project delivery, from initial configuration to final testing.

Hands-On Game Development with WebAssembly. Learn WebAssembly C++ programming by building a retro space game

Rick Battagline

Within the next few years, WebAssembly will change the web as we know it. It promises a world where you can write an application for the web in any language, and compile it for native platforms as well as the web.This book is designed to introduce web developers and game developers to the world of WebAssembly by walking through the development of a retro arcade game. You will learn how to build a WebAssembly application using C++, Emscripten, JavaScript, WebGL, SDL, and HTML5.This book covers a lot of ground in both game development and web application development. When creating a game or application that targets WebAssembly, developers need to learn a plethora of skills and tools. This book is a sample platter of those tools and skills. It covers topics including Emscripten, C/C++, WebGL, OpenGL, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS. The reader will also learn basic techniques for game development, including 2D sprite animation, particle systems, 2D camera design, sound effects, 2D game physics, user interface design, shaders, debugging, and optimization. By the end of the book, you will be able to create simple web games and web applications targeting WebAssembly.

Test-Driven Development with PHP 8. Build extensible, reliable, and maintainable enterprise-level applications using TDD and BDD with PHP

Rainier Sarabia, Ben Hansen

PHP web developers end up building complex enterprise projects without prior experience in test-driven and behavior-driven development which results in software that’s complex and difficult to maintain. This step-by-step guide helps you manage the complexities of large-scale web applications. It takes you through the processes of working on a project, starting from understanding business requirements and translating them into actual maintainable software, to automated deployments.You’ll learn how to break down business requirements into workable and actionable lists using Jira. Using those organized lists of business requirements, you’ll understand how to implement behavior-driven development (BDD) and test-driven development (TDD) to start writing maintainable PHP code. You’ll explore how to use the automated tests to help you stop introducing regressions to an application each time you release code by using continuous integration.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to start a PHP project, break down the requirements, build test scenarios and automated tests, and write more testable and maintainable PHP code. By learning these processes, you’ll be able to develop more maintainable, and reliable enterprise PHP applications.

Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Essentials. Design and deliver an optimal user experience for all devices

Alex Libby, Gaurav Gupta, Asoj Talesra

Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience—providing easy reading and navigation with minimum resizing, panning, and scrolling—and all of this across a wide range of devices from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones. Responsive web design is becoming more important as the amount of mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of the Internet’s total traffic.This book will give you in depth knowledge about the basics of responsive web design. You will embark on a journey of building effective responsive web pages that work across a range of devices, from mobile phones to smart TVs, with nothing more than standard markup and styling techniques.You'll begin by getting an understanding of what RWD is and its significance to the modern web. Building on the basics, you'll learn about layouts and media queries. Following this, we’ll dive into creating layouts using grid based templates. We’ll also cover the important topic of performance management, and discover how to tackle cross-browser challenges.

Groovy 2 Cookbook. Java and Groovy go together like ham and eggs, and this book is a great opportunity to learn how to exploit Groovy 2 to the full. Packed with recipes, both intermediate and advanced, it's a great way to speed up and modernize your programming

Luciano Fiandesio, Andrey Adamovich, Andrey Adamovich And Luciano Fiandesio

Get up to speed with Groovy, a language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that integrates features of both object-oriented and functional programming. This book will show you the powerful features of Groovy 2 applied to real-world scenarios and how the dynamic nature of the language makes it very simple to tackle problems that would otherwise require hours or days of research and implementation.Groovy 2 Cookbook contains a vast number of recipes covering many facets of today's programming landscape. From language-specific topics such as closures and metaprogramming, to more advanced applications of Groovy flexibility such as DSL and testing techniques, this book gives you quick solutions to everyday problems.The recipes in this book start from the basics of installing Groovy and running your first scripts and continue with progressively more advanced examples that will help you to take advantage of the language's amazing features.Packed with hundreds of tried-and-true Groovy recipes, Groovy 2 Cookbook includes code segments covering many specialized APIs to work with files and collections, manipulate XML, work with REST services and JSON, create asynchronous tasks, and more. But Groovy does more than just ease traditional Java development: it brings modern programming features to the Java platform like closures, duck-typing, and metaprogramming.In this new book, you'll find code examples that you can use in your projects right away along with a discussion about how and why the solution works. Focusing on what's useful and tricky, Groovy 2 Cookbook offers a wealth of useful code for all Java and Groovy programmers, not just advanced practitioners.

Scratch 2.0 Beginner's Guide. Create digital stories, games, art, and animations through six unique projects

Michael Badger

Twilio Cookbook. Over 70 easy-to-follow recipes, from exploring the key features of Twilio to building advanced telephony apps

Roger Stringer

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook. Over 80 practical recipes for creating rich, data-driven business applications in Silverlight

Kevin Dockx, Gill Cleeren

Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features including animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback – features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. However, Silverlight is a great (and growing) Line-Of-Business platform and is increasingly being used to build data-driven business applications. Silverlight Data Services enable efficient access to your data, allowing you to draw on multiple sources of data and solve particular data problems. There is very little existing material that demonstrates how to build data-driven solutions with the platform. Silverlight 3 made a big step into Line-Of-Business data services and Silverlight 4 builds further upon this. This book will enable .NET developers to get their finger on the pulse of data-driven business applications in Silverlight.This book is not a general Silverlight 3/4 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at developers who want to build data-driven applications. It focuses on showing .NET developers how to interact with, and handle multiple sources of data in Silverlight business applications, and how to solve particular data problems following a practical hands-on approach, using real-world recipes. It is a practical cookbook that teaches you how to build data-rich business applications with Silverlight that draw on multiple sources of data. Most of the covered features work both in Silverlight 3 and 4. However, we cover some that are specific for Silverlight 4, which will therefore not work with Silverlight 3. Where this is the case, it is clearly indicated.Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book begins by introducing you to general principles when programming Silverlight. It then dives deep into the world of data services, covering all the options available to access data and communicate with services to get the most out of data in your Silverlight business applications, whilst at the same time providing a rich user experience. Chapters cover data binding, data controls, the concepts of talking to services, communicating with WCF, ASMX and REST services, and much more.By following the practical recipes in this book, which are of varying difficulty levels, you will learn the concepts needed to create data-rich business applications—from the creation of a Silverlight application, to displaying data in the Silverlight application and upgrading your existing applications to use Silverlight. Each recipe covers a data services topic, going from the description of the problem, through a conceptual solution to a solution containing sample code.

Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection Cookbook. Install and manage System Center Endpoint Protection with total professionalism thanks to the 30 recipes in this highly focused Cookbook. From common tasks to automated reporting features, all the crucial techniques are here

Andrew J Plue, Andrew Plue

Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection (previously known as Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012) protects client and server operating systems against threats with leading malware detection technologies. Built on Configuration Manager, it provides a unified infrastructure for client security and compliance management and Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection Cookbook will help you get to grips with vital tasks for implementing this security tool.With the release of System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection, Microsoft is continuing its commitment to offering a cutting edge, enterprise- ready Anti-Virus solution. With its practical and easy to follow recipes, Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection Cookbook fully prepares you for a simple, headache-free migration. This hands-on, practical cookbook will have you equipped with the knowledge to install and manage System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection like a pro in no time by following step by step recipes.You'll gain insight into a wide range of management tasks, such as building your SCEP infrastructure, deploying SCEP clients and building the perfect AV policies for your workstation and servers. You'll also benefit from a complete SCEP walk-through in a bonus appendix chapter.With Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection Cookbook in hand, you will have the confidence to tackle essential tasks like deployment, policy and much more for SCEP.

Python for Google App Engine. Master the full range of development features provided by Google App Engine to build and run scalable web applications in Python

Massimiliano Pippi