Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook. If you're already au fait with Blender, this book gives extra power to your artist's elbow with a fantastic grounding in Cycles. Packed with tips and recipes, it makes light work of the toughest concepts. - Second Edition

Bernardo Iraci, Ton Roosendaal

Blender provides a broad spectrum of modeling, texturing, lighting, animation and video post-processing functionality in one package. It provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics applications in the world.Modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) have some limitations for rendering complex scenes. This is mainly because of limited memory, and interactivity issues when the same graphics card is also used for displaying and rendering frames. This is where Cycles rendering engine comes into play. Cycles is bundled as an add-on with Blender. Some of the features of Cycles is its quality, speed and having integrated industry standard libraries.This book will show you how to carry out your first steps in Cycles - a brand new rendering engine for Blender. In a gradual and logical way, you will learn how to create complex shaders and lighting setups to face any kind of situation that you may find in Computer Graphics.This book provides information on how to setup your first application in Cycles. You will start by adding lights, materials, and textures to your scene. When it's time for the final render, you will see how to setup Cycles in the best way. You will learn about a wide variety of materials, lighting, techniques, tips, and tricks to get the best out of Cycles. Further on in the book, you will get to know about animation and still shots, and learn how to create advanced materials for realistic rendering, as well cartoon style shaders.This cookbook contains a wide range of different scenes, proposed in a structured and progressive order. During this journey, you will get involved in the concepts behind every step you take in order to really master what you learn.

The Mini Book of Agile. Everything you really need to know about Agile, Agile Project Management and Agile Delivery

Mauricio Rubio Parra

Think of this book as Agile for Dummies (or Agile for anyone and everyone). This Agile book will allow you to master the most important concepts of Agile development, Agile project delivery, and Agile project management. This mini book has been designed to enable you to manage your projects in an Agile way.This mini book will walk you through the fundamentals, principles, and key concepts of Agile, Agile project management, and Agile Delivery.The book includes valuable resources, graphics, and examples that will allow you to grasp the key essence of Agile, Agile rituals, Agile practices, Agile concepts, and the key differences between Agile and traditional project management.After reading this book, you will have a thorough understanding of Agile and how to put Agile into practice at work and in your personal projects.

Microsoft Azure IaaS Essentials. Design, configure, and build your cloud-based infrastructure using Microsoft Azure

Guy Dillen, Gethyn Ellis

Architectural Visualization in Unreal Engine 5. Create photorealistic architectural interior renderings in UE5

Ludovico Palmeri

If you excel at creating beautiful architectural renderings using traditional software but want to master real-time, interactive visualizations, this book will show you how the versatile Unreal Engine 5 enables such transformations effortlessly. While UE5 is widely popular, existing online training resources can be overwhelming and often lack a focus on Architectural visualization. This comprehensive guide is for both beginners and experienced users offering a clear, end-to-end approach to creating stunning visualizations from scratch as well as managing tight deadlines, striving for photorealism, and handling typical client revisions inherent to architectural visualization.The book starts with an introduction to UE5 and its capabilities, as well as the basic concepts and principles of architectural visualization. You'll then progress to essential topics such as setting up a project, modeling and texturing 3D assets, lighting and materials, and post-processing effects. Along the way, you'll find practical tips, best practices, and hands-on exercises to develop your skills by applying what you learn.By the end of this book, you'll have acquired the skills to confidently create high-quality architectural visualizations in UE5 and become proficient in building an architectural interior scene to produce professional still images.

Express Your Creativity with Adobe Express. Create stunning graphics, captivating videos, and impressive web pages without any coding skills

Rosie Sue

Working with graphics can be daunting, especially if you don’t have a background in graphic design, but with Adobe Express, you can create stunning content without prior experience. This book will show you how you can choose from thousands of beautiful templates, customize them to your brand, and watch your visuals come to life.This book is your ultimate guide to Adobe Express, covering every function, from formatting typography to animating your graphics. With practical exercises, you’ll be able to put your newfound knowledge into action and start creating right away. You’ll learn the art of crafting stunning social media graphics, thumb-stopping animations, beautiful landing pages, and captivating videos.Whether you prefer the browser or mobile experience, Adobe Express provides the flexibility to create beautiful content seamlessly. Learning new skills and applying them has never been easier, as each chapter equips you to accomplish remarkable feats.By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered Adobe Express for elevating your online presence.

Learning Hyper-V. Learn how to design, deploy, configure, and manage virtualization infrastructure using Hyper-V

Vinicius R Apolinario, Vinicius Ramos Apolinario

Learning SaltStack. Build, manage, and secure your infrastructure with the power of SaltStack - Second Edition

Colton Myers

SaltStack is one of the best infrastructure management platforms available. It provides powerful tools for defining and enforcing the state of your infrastructure in a clear, concise way. With this book learn how to use these tools for your own infrastructure by understanding the core pieces of Salt.In this book we will take you from the initial installation of Salt, through running their first commands, and then talk about extending Salt for individual use cases. From there you will explore the state system inside of Salt, learning to define the desired state of our infrastructure in such a way that Salt can enforce that state with a single command. Finally, you will learn about some of the additional tools that salt provides, including salt-cloud, the reactor, and the event system. We?ll finish by exploring how to get involved with salt and what'?s new in the salt community.Finally, by the end of the book, you'll be able to build a reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure and fully utilize the power of cloud computing.

Bootstrap Site Blueprints. Without Bootstrap your web designs may not be reaching their full potential. This book will change that through a series of hands-on projects covering everything from custom icon fonts to JavaScript plugins

David Cochran, Ian Whitley