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.

Machine Learning Engineering on AWS. Build, scale, and secure machine learning systems and MLOps pipelines in production

Joshua Arvin Lat

There is a growing need for professionals with experience in working on machine learning (ML) engineering requirements as well as those with knowledge of automating complex MLOps pipelines in the cloud. This book explores a variety of AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, Amazon Redshift, and AWS Lake Formation, which ML practitioners can leverage to meet various data engineering and ML engineering requirements in production.This machine learning book covers the essential concepts as well as step-by-step instructions that are designed to help you get a solid understanding of how to manage and secure ML workloads in the cloud. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll discover how to use several container and serverless solutions when training and deploying TensorFlow and PyTorch deep learning models on AWS. You’ll also delve into proven cost optimization techniques as well as data privacy and model privacy preservation strategies in detail as you explore best practices when using each AWS.By the end of this AWS book, you'll be able to build, scale, and secure your own ML systems and pipelines, which will give you the experience and confidence needed to architect custom solutions using a variety of AWS services for ML engineering requirements.

Java EE 7 Development with NetBeans 8. Develop professional enterprise Java EE applications quickly and easily with this popular IDE

Autodesk Civil 3D 2025 Unleashed. Elevate your civil engineering designs and advance your career with Autodesk Civil 3D

Stephen Walz, Tony Sabat

Autodesk Civil 3D 2025 Unleashed is a comprehensive guide that equips civil engineers and designers with advanced skills to unlock new levels of efficiency in their projects and careers. Divided into four parts, this book addresses different aspects of Civil 3D capabilities and extensions. Starting with elevating Civil 3D designs using Building Information Modeling (BIM) principles, you’ll develop a strong foundation in BIM and its integration into civil engineering projects. By focusing on design customization with Civil 3D extensions, this book will empower you to harness reality capture technologies, optimize grading designs, and explore content catalog customization. You'll delve into information management and automation with Civil 3D, covering property sets, Project Explorer, and workflow automation using tools like Dynamo for Civil 3D (D4C3D) and scripting. The book will also demonstrate how to prepare BIM designs within Civil 3D for a multitude of downstream uses. Finally, you’ll discover how to extend infrastructure designs beyond Civil 3D and integrate them into the BIM process with Navisworks and InfraWorks for better project collaboration and visualization. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to prepare and use BIM designs within Civil 3D and several other products for easier project creation and management.

Less Web Development Essentials. Leverage the features of Less to write better, reusable, and maintainable CSS code

Bass Jobsen

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.

Advanced Python Programming. Accelerate your Python programs using proven techniques and design patterns - Second Edition

Quan Nguyen

Python's powerful capabilities for implementing robust and efficient programs make it one of the most sought-after programming languages.In this book, you'll explore the tools that allow you to improve performance and take your Python programs to the next level.This book starts by examining the built-in as well as external libraries that streamline tasks in the development cycle, such as benchmarking, profiling, and optimizing. You'll then get to grips with using specialized tools such as dedicated libraries and compilers to increase your performance at number-crunching tasks, including training machine learning models.The book covers concurrency, a major solution to making programs more efficient and scalable, and various concurrent programming techniques such as multithreading, multiprocessing, and asynchronous programming.You'll also understand the common problems that cause undesirable behavior in concurrent programs.Finally, you'll work with a wide range of design patterns, including creational, structural, and behavioral patterns that enable you to tackle complex design and architecture challenges, making your programs more robust and maintainable.By the end of the book, you'll be exposed to a wide range of advanced functionalities in Python and be equipped with the practical knowledge needed to apply them to your use cases.

Haxe Game Development Essentials. Create games on multiple platforms from a single codebase using Haxe and the HaxeFlixel engine

Jeremy McCurdy, Steven Richey

Haxe is a powerful and high-level multi-platform language that's incredibly easy to learn. Used by thousands of developers and many high-profile companies, Haxe is quickly emerging as a forerunner in the area of cross-platform programming. OpenFL builds on top of Haxe to make developing for multiple platforms quick and painless. HaxeFlixel provides you with the tools you need to build amazing 2D games easier than ever before. Cross-platform development has been supercharged using the Haxe programming language, making it increasingly easy and hassle-free to develop multi-platform games. If you've programmed games before and want to learn out how to deliver games across multiple platforms, or develop games faster, then Haxe Game Development Essentials is the book for you.It starts by showing you how to set up your development environment, then running you through some Haxe language fundamentals, and finally taking you through the process of programming a game from start to finish.You will learn how to create a side scrolling shooter game using HaxeFlixel. Next you will learn to enhance the game with new gameplay features, user interfaces, animations, sound, and configuration files to make your game expandable. Once your game is built and ready, you will learn how to deploy it to web, Android, iOS, and desktop systems. By the end of this book, you will be confident about creating multi-platform games using Haxe, OpenFL, and HaxeFlixel in a faster and easier way.

Building Levels in Unity. Create exciting 3D game worlds with Unity

Volodymyr Gerasimov

Data Analysis with Stata. Explore the big data field and learn how to perform data analytics and predictive modelling in STATA

Prasad Kothari, Rahul Sharma

Mongoose for Application Development. Mongoose streamlines application development on the Node.js stack and this book is the ideal guide to both the concepts and practical application. From connecting to a database to re-usable plugins, it's all here

Mongoose is all about putting the data model where it should be: in your application. You can control everything from within your application in JavaScript, eliminating the need to work with the database or a separate management system.Mongoose for Application Development is a practical, hands-on guide that takes you from installing the technology stack through the steps of developing a web application. It covers the key features of Mongoose and how to use them to rapidly develop a Node.js and MongoDB application.This book introduces the full technology stack of Node.js, MongoDB, Express, and Mongoose. It will take you through the process of building an application on this stack with a focus on how Mongoose makes the process quicker and easier.You will see how Mongoose removes a layer of complexity when dealing with MongoDB whilst giving you more control over your data from your application. You will learn how to define schemas and models for your data in JavaScript. Using these schemas and models, you will learn how to build the cornerstone of any web application that will include CRUD operations (creating, reading, updating, and deleting data). If you want to learn how to build applications quickly and efficiently using Node.js, then Mongoose and this book are ideal for you.Using practical examples throughout, Mongoose for Application Development not only teaches you about the concepts of Mongoose, but walks through how to use them to build a real-life application.

Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook. Over 50 recipes to help you transform your game into a visually stunning masterpiece - Fourth Edition

John P. Doran

Shaders enable you to create powerful visuals for your game projects. However, creating shaders for your games can be notoriously challenging with various factors such as complex mathematics standing in the way of attaining the level of realism you crave for your shaders.The Unity 2021 Shaders and Effects Cookbook helps you overcome that with a recipe-based approach to creating shaders using Unity. This fourth edition is updated and enhanced using Unity 2021 features and tools covering Unity's new way of creating particle effects with the VFX Graph. You'll learn how to use VFX Graph for advanced shader development. The book also features updated recipes for using Shader Graph to create 2D and 3D elements. You'll cover everything you need to know about vectors, how they can be used to construct lighting, and how to use textures to create complex effects without the heavy math. You'll also understand how to use the visual-based Shader Graph for creating shaders without any code.By the end of this Unity book, you'll have developed a set of shaders that you can use in your Unity 3D games and be able to accomplish new effects and address the performance needs of your Unity game development projects. So, let's get started!

Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.1. Discover innovative ways to solve your mission-critical integration problems with the ESB Toolkit

Andres Del R-o Benito, Howard Edidin

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an architectural pattern and a key enabler in implementing the infrastructure for a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The BizTalk ESB Toolkit is a collection of tools and libraries that extend the BizTalk Server capabilities of supporting a loosely coupled and dynamic messaging architecture. It functions as middleware that provides tools for rapid mediation between services and their consumers. Enabling maximum flexibility at runtime, the BizTalk ESB Toolkit simplifies loosely coupled composition of service endpoints and management of service interactions. The thing about the technology that gets most readers excited is how easy it is to quickly implement flexible and well-architected ESB solutions.Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 ESB Toolkit 2.1 provides you with an easy-to-follow view of the tools and services that make up the toolkit. The content is packed with practical examples on how to utilize the technology, which will be appealing to the readers. This book provides you with all the information you need in one publication. The content is based on practical examples on how to use the technology to make it easier for readers to follow.This book starts off with a quick, high level introduction to ESB architectural principles, how these principles map into the ESB toolkit features, and an introduction to the different components that provide those features. The book then reveals the ins and outs of Itineraries. Next, you'll get engaged in the different ways errors can be handled and monitored by means of the ESB Toolkit features. There will be a hands-on sample on building a custom Repair and Resubmit solution to reprocess failed messages. Get to know the different web services that expose the ESB Toolkit features to external applications and how to use them with quick samples. The book ends with a preview to the new version of the toolkit.

Elasticsearch Server. Leverage Elasticsearch to create a robust, fast, and flexible search solution with ease - Third Edition

Marek Rogozinski, Rafal Kuc

ElasticSearch is a very fast and scalable open source search engine, designed with distribution and cloud in mind, complete with all the goodies that Apache Lucene has to offer. ElasticSearch’s schema-free architecture allows developers to index and search unstructured content, making it perfectly suited for both small projects and large big data warehouses, even those with petabytes of unstructured data.This book will guide you through the world of the most commonly used ElasticSearch server functionalities. You’ll start off by getting an understanding of the basics of ElasticSearch and its data indexing functionality. Next, you will see the querying capabilities of ElasticSearch, followed by a through explanation of scoring and search relevance. After this, you will explore the aggregation and data analysis capabilities of ElasticSearch and will learn how cluster administration and scaling can be used to boost your application performance. You’ll find out how to use the friendly REST APIs and how to tune ElasticSearch to make the most of it. By the end of this book, you will have be able to create amazing search solutions as per your project’s specifications.

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.

R Graph Essentials

David Lillis, David A Lillis

Effective Python Penetration Testing. Pen test your system like a pro and overcome vulnerabilities by leveraging Python scripts, libraries, and tools

Rejah Rehim

Penetration testing is a practice of testing a computer system, network, or web application to find weaknesses in security that an attacker can exploit. Effective Python Penetration Testing will help you utilize your Python scripting skills to safeguard your networks from cyberattacks. We will begin by providing you with an overview of Python scripting and penetration testing. You will learn to analyze network traffic by writing Scapy scripts and will see how to fingerprint web applications with Python libraries such as ProxMon and Spynner. Moving on, you will find out how to write basic attack scripts, and will develop debugging and reverse engineering skills with Python libraries. Toward the end of the book, you will discover how to utilize cryptography toolkits in Python and how to automate Python tools and libraries.

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.

Transformers for Natural Language Processing. Build, train, and fine-tune deep neural network architectures for NLP with Python, Hugging Face, and OpenAI's GPT-3, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 - Second Edition

Denis Rothman, Antonio Gulli

Transformers are...well...transforming the world of AI. There are many platforms and models out there, but which ones best suit your needs?Transformers for Natural Language Processing, 2nd Edition, guides you through the world of transformers, highlighting the strengths of different models and platforms, while teaching you the problem-solving skills you need to tackle model weaknesses.You'll use Hugging Face to pretrain a RoBERTa model from scratch, from building the dataset to defining the data collator to training the model.If you're looking to fine-tune a pretrained model, including GPT-3, then Transformers for Natural Language Processing, 2nd Edition, shows you how with step-by-step guides.The book investigates machine translations, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, question-answering, and many more NLP tasks. It provides techniques to solve hard language problems and may even help with fake news anxiety (read chapter 13 for more details).You'll see how cutting-edge platforms, such as OpenAI, have taken transformers beyond language into computer vision tasks and code creation using DALL-E 2, ChatGPT, and GPT-4.By the end of this book, you'll know how transformers work and how to implement them and resolve issues like an AI detective.

Game Development with Unity for .NET Developers. The ultimate guide to creating games with Unity and Microsoft Game Stack

Jiadong Chen, Ed Price

Understand what makes Unity the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform and explore its powerful features for creating 3D and 2D games, as well as the Unity game engine and the Microsoft Game Dev, including the Microsoft Azure Cloud and Microsoft Azure PlayFab services, to create games.You will start by getting acquainted with the Unity editor and the basic concepts of Unity script programming with C#. You'll then learn how to use C# code to work with Unity's built-in modules, such as UI, animation, physics, video, and audio, and understand how to develop a game with Unity and C#. As you progress through the chapters, you'll cover advanced topics such as the math involved in computer graphics and how to create a custom render pipeline in Unity with the new Scriptable Render Pipeline, all while optimizing performance in Unity. Along the way, you'll be introduced to Microsoft Game Dev, Azure services, and Azure PlayFab, and using the Unity3D PlayFab SDK to access the PlayFab API.By the end of this Unity book, you'll have become familiar with the Unity engine and be ready to develop your own games while also addressing the performance issues that you could encounter in the development process.

SFML Blueprints. Sharpen your game development skills and improve your C++ and SFML knowledge with five exciting projects

SFML, Maxime Barbier

Customizing and Extending SharePoint Online. Design tailor-made solutions with modern SharePoint features to meet your organization's unique needs

Matti Paukkonen

Explore the robust functionalities of SharePoint that ensure your business processes remain flexible and scalable. With its custom development features, SharePoint presents abundant opportunities to meet evolving needs, deliver personalized experiences, and seamlessly integrate across platforms. If you’re looking for practical guidance on developing custom SharePoint solutions, Customizing and Extending SharePoint Online is your essential companion.This book takes you through the different techniques for customizing SharePoint, harnessing its native capabilities, and extending them across other platforms. You’ll begin by organizing content with SharePoint sites and learning best practices for permission governance before learning how to create and manage pages and use web parts to create, aggregate, and format content. This SharePoint book also covers specialized use cases of the Viva Suite and delves into SharePoint automation with Power Automate while extending solutions with Power Apps. Toward the end, you’ll get to grips with designing personalized solutions with SharePoint Framework and Microsoft Graph.By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to deliver highly customized SharePoint solutions that align with your business objectives.