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.

Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide. Bring your data to life through data modeling, visualization, digital storytelling, and more - Second Edition

Devin Knight, Mitchell Pearson, Bradley Schacht, Erin Ostrowsky

This revised edition has been fully updated to reflect the latest enhancements to Power BI. It includes a new chapter dedicated to dataflow, and covers all the essential concepts such as installation, designing effective data models, as well as building basic dashboards and visualizations to help you and your organization make better business decisions.You’ll learn how to obtain data from a variety of sources and clean it using Power BI Query Editor. You’ll then find out how you can design your data model to navigate and explore relationships within it and build DAX formulas to make your data easier to work with. Visualizing your data is a key element in this book, and you’ll get to grips rapidly with data visualization styles and enhanced digital storytelling techniques. In addition, you will acquire the skills to build your own dataflows, understand the Common Data Model, and automate data flow refreshes to eradicate data cleansing inefficiency.This guide will help you understand how to administer your organization's Power BI environment so that deployment can be made seamless, data refreshes can run properly, and security can be fully implemented.By the end of this Power BI book, you’ll have a better understanding of how to get the most out of Power BI to perform effective business intelligence.

Flash with Drupal. Build dynamic, content-rich Flash CS3 and CS4 applications for Drupal 6

Travis Tidwell, Dries Buytaert

Due to its power and expandability, Drupal has become one of the most popular open source content management systems. At the same time, Flash has been adopted for its ability to create beautiful and dynamic web applications. By combining these technologies, you can create Flash applications that are both visually stunning and rich in content.This book is an in depth discussion and tutorial on how to integrate Flash applications with Drupal CMS. It will describe the best techniques and practices for integrating Flash technology with the power and flexibility of Drupal by building real-life Flash applications.Within this book, you will learn how to build Flash applications that show text from within Drupal and also present images, music, and video within a single Flash application. You will also be able to take advantage of the expandable fields and content filtering provided from the CCK and Views modules to add flexibility and power to your Flash applications. Finally, you will learn how to add your own custom functionality to Drupal and then utilize that from within your Flash applications leaving you with a world of possibilities.This book starts out with a simple introduction to Flash and Drupal technology where you will create a simple Flash application and then embed that within Drupal. From there, each subsequent chapter builds on the previous chapters tackling a new and challenging task.For each new task, you will take a step-by-step approach to building a real-life application that utilizes the feature introduced within that chapter. You will also explore alternative design approaches that will eliminate the current design challenges that developers face when building Flash-driven Drupal sites; and all this while staying true to the Object Oriented Principles that govern the foundation of the ActionScript 3 language. By the end of this book, you will be able to apply all the lessons learned from this book to any other use case you may encounter.

Leap Motion Development Essentials. Leverage the power of Leap Motion to develop and deploy a fully interactive application

Mischa Spiegelmock

Leap Motion is a company developing advanced motion sensing technology for human–computer interaction. Originally inspired by the level of difficulty of using a mouse and keyboard for 3D modeling, Leap Motion believe that moulding virtual clay should be as easy as moulding clay in your hands. Leap Motion now focus on bringing this motion sensing technology closer to the real world.Leap Motion Development Essentials explains the concepts and practical applications of gesture input for developers who want to take full advantage of Leap Motion technology. This guide explores the capabilities available to developers and gives you a clear overview of topics related to gesture input along with usable code samples.Leap Motion Development Essentials shows you everything you need to know about the Leap Motion SDK, from creating a working program with gesture input to more sophisticated applications covering a range of relevant topics. Sample code is provided and explained along with details of the most important and central API concepts.This book teaches you the essential information you need to design a gesture-enabled interface for your application, from specific gesture detection to best practices for this new input. You will be given guidance on practical considerations along with copious runnable demonstrations of API usage which are explained in step-by-step, reusable recipes.

Professional Cloud Architect Google Cloud Certification Guide. Build a solid foundation in Google Cloud Platform to achieve the most lucrative IT certification - Second Edition

Konrad Cłapa, Brian Gerrard, Yujun Liang

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the industry leaders thanks to its array of services that can be leveraged by organizations to bring the best out of their infrastructure. This book is a comprehensive guide for learning methods to effectively utilize GCP services and help you become acquainted with the topics required to pass Google's Professional Cloud Architect certification exam.Following the Professional Cloud Architect's official exam syllabus, you'll first be introduced to the GCP. The book then covers the core services that GCP offers, such as computing and storage, and takes you through effective methods of scaling and automating your cloud infrastructure. As you progress through the chapters, you'll get to grips with containers and services and discover best practices related to the design and process. This revised second edition features new topics such as Cloud Run, Anthos, Data Fusion, Composer, and Data Catalog.By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge required to take and pass the Google Cloud Certification – Professional Cloud Architect exam and become an expert in GCP services.

Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere. Techniques to fuel business productivity and intelligent automation using RPA

Husan Mahey

With an increase in the number of organizations deploying RPA solutions, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is quickly becoming the most desired skill set for both developers starting their career and seasoned professionals. This book will show you how to use Automation Anywhere A2019, one of the leading platforms used widely for RPA.Starting with an introduction to RPA and Automation Anywhere, the book will guide you through the registration, installation, and configuration of the Bot agent and Control Room. With the help of easy-to-follow instructions, you’ll build your first bot and discover how you can automate tasks with Excel, Word, emails, XML, and PDF files. You’ll learn from practical examples based on real-world business scenarios, and gain insights into building more robust and resilient bots, executing external scripts such as VBScripts and Python, and adding error handling routines.By the end of this RPA book, you’ll have developed the skills required to install and configure an RPA platform confidently and have a solid understanding of how to build complex and robust, yet performant, bots.

DevOps Culture and Practice with OpenShift. Deliver continuous business value through people, processes, and technology

Tim Beattie, Mike Hepburn, Noel O'Connor, Donal Spring, ...

DevOps Culture and Practice with OpenShift features many different real-world practices - some people-related, some process-related, some technology-related - to facilitate successful DevOps, and in turn OpenShift, adoption within your organization. It introduces many DevOps concepts and tools to connect culture and practice through a continuous loop of discovery, pivots, and delivery underpinned by a foundation of collaboration and software engineering.Containers and container-centric application lifecycle management are now an industry standard, and OpenShift has a leading position in a flourishing market of enterprise Kubernetes-based product offerings. DevOps Culture and Practice with OpenShift provides a roadmap for building empowered product teams within your organization.This guide brings together lean, agile, design thinking, DevOps, culture, facilitation, and hands-on technical enablement all in one book. Through a combination of real-world stories, a practical case study, facilitation guides, and technical implementation details, DevOps Culture and Practice with OpenShift provides tools and techniques to build a DevOps culture within your organization on Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform.

Augmented Reality with Kinect. If you know C/C++ programming, then this book will give you the ability to develop augmented reality applications with Microsoft's Kinect. By the end of the course you will have created a complete game

Rui Wang

Microsoft Kinect changes the notion of user interface design. It differs from most other user input controllers as it enables users to interact with the program without touching the mouse or a trackpad. It utilizes motion sensing technology and all it needs is a real-time cameras, tracked skeletons, and gestures.Augmented Reality with Kinect will help you get into the world of Microsoft Kinect programming with the C/C++ language. The book will cover the installation, image streaming, skeleton and face tracking, multi-touch cursors and gesture emulation. Finally, you will end up with a complete Kinect-based game.Augmented Reality with Kinect will help you get into the world of Kinect programming, with a few interesting recipes and a relatively complete example. The book will introduce the following topics: the installation and initialization of Kinect applications; capturing color and depth images; obtaining skeleton and face tracking data; emulating multi-touch cursors and gestures; and developing a complete game using Kinect features.The book is divided in such a way so as to ensure that each topic is given the right amount of focus. Beginners will start from the first chapter and build up to developing their own applications.

The Statistics and Machine Learning with R Workshop. Unlock the power of efficient data science modeling with this hands-on guide

Liu Peng

The Statistics and Machine Learning with R Workshop is a comprehensive resource packed with insights into statistics and machine learning, along with a deep dive into R libraries. The learning experience is further enhanced by practical examples and hands-on exercises that provide explanations of key concepts.Starting with the fundamentals, you’ll explore the complete model development process, covering everything from data pre-processing to model development. In addition to machine learning, you’ll also delve into R's statistical capabilities, learning to manipulate various data types and tackle complex mathematical challenges from algebra and calculus to probability and Bayesian statistics. You’ll discover linear regression techniques and more advanced statistical methodologies to hone your skills and advance your career.By the end of this book, you'll have a robust foundational understanding of statistics and machine learning. You’ll also be proficient in using R's extensive libraries for tasks such as data processing and model training and be well-equipped to leverage the full potential of R in your future projects.

Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development. Create, customize, and optimize your own professional games from scratch with Unity 2021 - Second Edition

Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo

Learning how to use Unity is the quickest way to creating a full game, but that’s not all you can do with this simple, yet comprehensive suite of video game development tools – Unity is just as useful for creating AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and practical games for training and education. Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development outlines a practical journey to creating your first full game from the ground up, building it step-by-step and applying your knowledge as you progress.Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will teach you how to develop the game using several Unity tools. As you advance, you will learn how to use the Unity engine, create simple scripts using C#, integrate graphics, sound, and animations, and manipulate physics to create interesting mechanics for your game. You’ll be able to apply all the knowledge that you gain to a real-world game. Later chapters will show you how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs efficiently. Finally, you'll work with Unity's AR tools to create AR experiences for 3D apps and games.By the end of this Unity book, you will have created a complete game and built a solid foundation in using a wide variety of Unity tools.

Offline First Web Development. Design and build robust offline-first apps for exceptional user experience even when an internet connection is absent

Daniel Sauble

When building mobile apps, it’s easy to forget about the moments when your users lack a good Internet connection. Put your phone in airplane mode, open a few popular apps, and you’ll quickly see how they handle being offline. From Twitter to Pinterest to Apple Maps, some apps might handle being offline better—but very few do it well. A poor offline experience will result in frustrated users who will abandon your app, or worse, turn to your competitor’s appsExpert or novice, this book will teach you everything you need to know about designing and building a rigorous offline app experience. By putting the offline experience first, you’ll have a solid foundation to build upon, avoiding the unnecessary stress and frustration of trying to retrofit offline capabilities into your finished app. This basic principle, designing for the worst-case scenario, could save you countless hours of wasted effort.

CMS Made Simple 1.6: Beginner's Guide. Create a fully functional and professional website using CMS Made Simple

Sofia Hauschildt, Ted Kulp (USD)

CMS Made Simple is a an open source content management system that allows rapid website development in a fraction of the normal time, avoiding hours of coding by providing modules and 3rd Party add-ons. With this book in hand you will be able to harness the power of this modular and extendable content management system at your fingertips.This guide for CMS Made Simple is based on practical and working solutions allowing you to understand how this powerful and simple application can support you in your daily work. The workshop helps you create engaging, effective, and easy-to-use CMS websites for businesses, clubs, or organizations.This is a step- by-step case study, aimed at helping you build a complete professional website with CMS Made Simple. You can take a ready-to-use template or implement your own custom design, enrich the website with features like a photo gallery, an e-commerce solution with PayPal checkout, and forms of any complexity or popular JQuery effects and finish it off by optimizing it for search engines. The useful HTML and CSS code snippets are optimized and can be easily adapted for your own projects. Chapter by chapter you will put yourself in the role of web designer, developer, administrator, and business manager, thus learning every aspect needed for building rich websites that are very simple to manage.

Responsible AI in the Enterprise. Practical AI risk management for explainable, auditable, and safe models with hyperscalers and Azure OpenAI

Adnan Masood, Heather Dawe, Ed Price, Dr. Ehsan Adeli

Responsible AI in the Enterprise is a comprehensive guide to implementing ethical, transparent, and compliant AI systems in an organization. With a focus on understanding key concepts of machine learning models, this book equips you with techniques and algorithms to tackle complex issues such as bias, fairness, and model governance. Throughout the book, you’ll gain an understanding of FairLearn and InterpretML, along with Google What-If Tool, ML Fairness Gym, IBM AI 360 Fairness tool, and Aequitas. You’ll uncover various aspects of responsible AI, including model interpretability, monitoring and management of model drift, and compliance recommendations. You’ll gain practical insights into using AI governance tools to ensure fairness, bias mitigation, explainability, privacy compliance, and privacy in an enterprise setting. Additionally, you’ll explore interpretability toolkits and fairness measures offered by major cloud AI providers like IBM, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, while discovering how to use FairLearn for fairness assessment and bias mitigation. You’ll also learn to build explainable models using global and local feature summary, local surrogate model, Shapley values, anchors, and counterfactual explanations.By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped with tools and techniques to create transparent and accountable machine learning models.

JIRA Essentials. Use the features of JIRA to manage projects and effectively handle bugs and software issues

Patrick Li

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020. Supercharge your image editing using the latest features and techniques in Photoshop Elements - Second Edition

Robin Nichols

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a raster graphics editor for entry-level photographers, image editors, and hobbyists. Updated and improved to cover the latest features of Photoshop Elements 2020, this second edition includes focused coverage of Adobe's new AI-powered features that are designed to make the editing process more efficient, creative and fun.This book takes you through the complexities of image editing in easy-to-follow, bite-sized chunks, helping you to quickly recognize the editing challenge at hand and use suitable tools and techniques to overcome it. You’ll start by learning how to import, organize, manage, edit, and use your pictures in a format that’s designed for creative photography projects. Throughout this Adobe Photoshop Elements book, you'll discover how to fix different photographic problems using an extensive repertoire of commonly applied solutions. Common processes such as applying artistic effects to creative projects, custom image makeovers, processing images for social media, and other file export methods will also be covered.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned about the impressive tools available in Photoshop Elements 2020, and how it is designed not only for photographers who’d like to dip their toes into the editing world, but also for those wanting simple but effective ideas on how to expand their creativity while remaining time-efficient.

Building CI/CD Systems Using Tekton. Develop flexible and powerful CI/CD pipelines using Tekton Pipelines and Triggers

Joel Lord

Tekton is a powerful yet flexible Kubernetes-native open source framework for creating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems. It enables you to build, test, and deploy across multiple cloud providers or on-premise systems.Building CI/CD Systems Using Tekton covers everything you need to know to start building your pipeline and automating application delivery in a cloud-native environment. Using a hands-on approach, you will learn about the basic building blocks, such as tasks, pipelines, and workspaces, which you can use to compose your CI/CD pipelines. As you progress, you will understand how to use these Tekton objects in conjunction with Tekton Triggers to automate the delivery of your application in a Kubernetes cluster.By the end of this book, you will have learned how to compose Tekton Pipelines and use them with Tekton Triggers to build powerful CI/CD systems.