Richard Salinas - 3D Printing With RepRap Cookbook

It has been reasonably busy here lately trying to keep up with book reviewing.  To that end the people at Packt Publishing contacted me and asked if I would review one of their latest books "3D Printing With RepRap Cookbook" by Richard Salinas.

Since a lot of Blender users are also 3D printer owners I thought it maybe useful to review this book, even if you are not owners of this specific brand of 3D printer a lot of the information contained within this book should still be useful.

Product Specifications:

• Name : 3D Printing With RepRap Cookbook
• Author : Richard Salinas
• Price : £14.44 (on 24th July 2014)
• Pages : 346
• Format : EBook
• Website : http://bit.ly/1jAyZ2U (http://www.packtpub.com/3d-printing-with-reprap-cookbook/book)

Before the book review I feel it is useful at this point to have a look at the author of this book Richard Salinas, here's his background information from the book:

"Richard Salinas is a scenic artist in the film industry, where he has worked for over 20 years on numerous television and motion picture productions.
    He was educated at the University of Missouri where he studied sculpture and three-dimensional design.
    He also has a formal education in the field of electronics. He developed an interest in computers in 1981 when he began programming on his university's mainframe and one of the first affordable personal computers: the Commodore VIC-20.
    Since 2012, he's constructed five 3D printers of various designs and hacks. His aim is to explore the possibilities of creating fine art sculpture with DIY technology. You can follow his progress at www.3dprintedsculpture.com"

Scanning the information in the bio above it should become clear of the type of mind Mr Salinas has, very clever, technical and very geeky.  It doesn't mention it in the bio but I bet he has memorized printer codes, knows machine code, etc. I mention this to put you in the right mindset.

The RepRap series of printers are for the truly experimental types, the ones who like to control every setting and know what every single belt, pulley and firmware setting does.

For those that don't know the RepRap is an Open Source  3D printer that can come in kit form and you can if you want build it yourself.  In fact a lot of the parts that go into the construction of the RepRap can be printed with a RepRap.

So knowing all the above it should be easier to understand the target audience this book is aimed at;  I would suggest an Intermediate level 3D printer user who has some experience with using a 3D printer.  You won't need to be a guru, but if you are completely new to 3D printing and your first experience of it is with a RepRap printer and this book, then you may have to run fast to keep up.

Like all of Packt's other Cookbook series of books its take the approach of breaking up a complex series of tasks into a series of bite sized "recipes".  Each recipe goes over a specific topic or task to help the reader more fully understand information presented.  After each recipe is completed the book give a full explanation as to why each recipe was done the way it was and often gives extra information for those interested. 

The are plenty of full of color pictures throughout explaining and demonstrating almost all of the topics and features of the RepRap printer and the software that you can use to improve the quality of it's output.

The beginning chapters of the book unsurprisingly cover the basics of 3D printing, going over what 3D printer are, the various terminology, what slicers are and how 3D models are used inside of a computer to be 3D printed.

The beginning chapters had some very useful descriptions of the software and hardware you can use to acquire models for 3D printing. Specifically you are shown how to scan 3D models using various different techniques, from using a digital camera, using a laser scanner and manually creating the models inside of a 3D modeling application.  Once the models are obtained you are then shown how to do a basic 3D printing of the models.

Initially the first results may not look very impressive but as the chapters progress the range of techniques you can use are expanded slowly but surely improving the 3D printing results that you achieve.  A common collection of models is used in all the recipes allowing you to see the difference in printing results as you try the different settings and tweaks the book describes.

In later chapters you are exposed to printing more complex and detailed models which require you to use more and more features of the 3D printing software to achieve acceptable results, topics such as support structures, slicer setting and non-manifold topology are covered extensively.  Surprisingly one of the simplest methods of getting complex shapes to more easily 3D print wasn't covered, that being breaking model into sections that can be connected back together;  I am not sure why this is the case maybe the author assumed that people with RepRap printers didn't need to be shown such obvious methods.  Other than that one oversight as far as I can tell all the useful topics were covered.

There is quite a large collection of software involved in getting good results from a RepRap printer, in fact that are many different pieces of software that can achieve the same tasks but do it in slightly different/better ways from one another.  Helpfully the book demonstrates how to use multiple different pieces of software to achieve to the same task.  As a result you are able to compare and contrast end results.

Another interesting parts of the book for me was the section on troubleshooting the 3D models to make them more likely to successfully 3D print.  There was extensive use of software to make the models jump through all the hoops required to get it in a form that makes a 3D printer such as the RepRap happy.

Finally the appendices of the book are worthy of note;  The first two are very technical and only the most hardcore RepRap fanatic (or hardcore geek) is likely to find them useful.  The third appendices though I found very useful as it covers all the different types of material filaments the RepRap supports and their operating values, as well as safety precautions that should be taken when using those materials.

At times the amount of new information presented in this book can become a little intense but if you go back and reread parts over again they should become clearer.

Good book, but you better have that RepRap experiment and tinker spirit to get the most from it.

Review Score 80%

Aidy Burrows - Complete Environment and Animation Project

I was recently contacted by CG Masters to do a review of one of their newest video training products.  This time it was created by Aidy Burrows a very experienced 3D artists who has worked on many large and complex projects.

Aidy's latest product for CG Masters is a collection of video tutorials which goes over all the steps involved in creating a short animation of a large scale environment.

The total runtime of all the videos is more than 25 hours, so it is an enormous amount of content, you will need lots of time to take it all in and because it's aimed at Intermediate/Advanced level Blender users, you will most likely need to rewatch it several times for it all to sink in.

The animation contains 3 scenes, an inner city street scene, a dance hall, and a sewer scene.

Aidy goes over all of the steps required to model, sculpt, texture, composite, render and video edit each of these scenes to produce the final animation.

Product Specifications:

• Name : Complete Environment and Animation Project
• Author : Aidy Burrows
• Price : $60 (on 13th July 2014)
• Runtime : 25 Hours
• Format : Video
• Website : http://www.cgmasters.net/training-dvds/complete-environment-and-animation-project/

All of the videos are very clear and well encoded, you can access them directly or using a very clean web browser interface.  All the resources needed to follow along with the videos are provided.  The resources provided are extensive in terms of textures and Blend files.

The approach taken with each of the scenes when creating them is the same for each:

• Create Rough Block out Model of Scenes
• Create Higher Poly Representations
• Sculpt High Poly Models
• Texture and Bake High Poly Models onto Low Poly Models
• Make them renderable in Blender Cycles

The scenes that are created are done in such a way as to take High Poly models and reduce them down to low poly models which can be used in realtime environments such as game engines but still retain the vast majority of their high detail levels and be used to make high quality renders in Cycles.

So the videos will be useful to multiple target audiences:

• If you are interested in how to construct various architectural scenes in a structured and efficient way.
• If you are wanting to learn how to quickly create high quality textures using Gimp.
• If you need models that will be usable inside of Game Engine Environments.
• How to use the textures inside of Cycles and it's shader nodes

I can't stress enough how useful these videos will be to people who need to do high quality texturing work or realtime environment work.  The methods and techniques Aidy uses really make even very large scenes manageable on even moderate machines.

The introductory videos go over all the basic techniques that Aidy uses to create all scenes, props and shaders.  These techniques are then used throughout the rest of the videos.  So if you have never used the techniques that Aidy uses they are explained well and assuming you are an Intermediate/Advanced level Blenderhead you should not have any problems.

The videos are recorded in a mix of realtime playback speed and timelapse.  Aidy will show you in normal speed what he is doing and then when he repeats the process he will generally switch to timelapsed mode.  Even in timelapsed mode the videos are still clear and easy to follow.

You are effectively getting 3 products in one:

• Teaches how to model/sculpt.
• Extensive Gimp texture creation knowledge.
• Compositing, Rendering and Animation.

Any one of these products would be worth the price.

I learned a lot about baking of Normal Maps and texture creation using gimp and how to mix them together using Vertex Painting.

Normally I would give more details of the topics and techniques Aidy uses to achieve the effects in the videos, but there are so many and the range of techniques used is so large that it would be an enormous repetitive list which would basically boil down to "Aidy teaches topic X, it was well explained and clear", "Aidy teaches topic Y it was well explained and clear", and so on.  So as far as I am able to discern every topic you need to create high quality, efficient, large scale scenes is covered, all very well.

No Python or Blender Game Engine Logic Node use is covered as Aidy does not need these features to achieve the results he needs.

So it's a short review for such a large product, but the quality is excellent and I would imagine that anyone wanting to get to grips with large scale scene creation which is impressively textured and yet resource efficient will find this product very useful.  I would recommend going to the CG Masters website and checking out the example videos and check out the list of topics they cover.  All of them are done well.

Well worth the money.

Review Score 95%