Gottfried Hofmann - Point Density Magical FX Pro Edition

Blender as a 3D Creation Suit is going on its ever continuing march of adding new features and improving features that already exists within it.

One of those improved features of Blender that recently got some attention was Point Density textures.

Previously Point Density Textures were supported in the Blender Internal Render but not in the Cycles Render.  However recently Blender Cycles gained the support of Point Density Textures.

For those who are not aware of what Point Density textures are the quickest way to describe them is that they are in some ways similar to Blender Smoke features but for vertices and particles.  Anywhere an object, vertices or particle appears in a Point Density Domain (3D Voxel Domain) will be rendered similar to the way smoke particles are.  Point Density support is a form of Volumetric Rendering.

Point Density Textures allow for a myriad of Volumetic Rendering effects.  Anything where you need smoke-like, dust trails, turning objects in to glowing plasmatic forms, etc without all the intense calculation involved with real smoke simulation the Point Density Texture may be able to step in.

Now Blenderheads are very quick to take Blenders new and improved features and put them to the test to see what they can do with them.  One of those very experienced Blenderheads Gottfried Hofmann contacted me to ask if I would review his newest product called "Point Density Magical FX".

Since I am a big fan of Gottfried's work and I really like his BlenderDiplom Blender tutorial website, I was eager to see exactly what he could do with Point Density Textures.

Product Specifications:

• Name : Point Density Magical FX
• Author : Gottfried Hofmann
• Price : $37 Pro Edition (on 11th Feb 2016)
• Price : $27 Pro Edition (on 11th Feb 2016)
• Shop URL : http://www.blenderdiplom.com/en/shop/611-point-density-magical-fx.html

Gottfried's newest product aims to both describe how to use and setup Point Density Textures to achieve various cool looking special effects and to provides templates which can be used in your own projects for what ever you need.  This useful as there are not really many tutorials on doing Point Density special effects type things so it fills a gap.

You can download the product from Gottfried's website when you do you are taken to the gumroad.com website.  This website is similar to Blender Cookie in that it allows you to host and sell various types of things such as videos and tutorial.

I have never used gumroad before but in reviewing Gottfried's work I can say that it was very easy to use.  You can download the various purchased resourced or you can watch them online, it will even let you download directly to a Drop Box account, though I was not able to test the Drop Box feature as I do not own a Drop Box account.

To start with on getting a request email from Gottfried to review his product I got directed to his website and on purchasing the product I was directed to gumroad.com.  From there setting up an account was very straightforward.

All purchased products are added to your gumroad.com library where you can browse and view your items as you wish.

I tend to like to download and watch all the things I have so that's what I did.

The Point Density Magical FX comes with various things:

• Templates
• Demo Files
• Training Videos
• PDF-Guide to Point Density in Cycles
• Starter Files for training Videos
• .blend of Promo Image
• Documentation of Templates 

There are two different versions of Point Density Magical Fx, a Pro and a Training version.  The Pro version comes will all the things mentioned above while the Training version comes with:

• Training Videos
• Starter .blends
• .blend of the Promo Image

I mainly concentrated on reviewing the Videos and PDF files as these are the most important in getting to grips with how Point Density Textures can be used.

If you download all the files it is roughly 4gig in size.  So you will need a reasonably good internet connection speed or a lot of free time.  Though the website seems very stable and I had no problems downloading the content.

The PDF file was the first thing I read and it gave a to the point review of what Point Density Textures are and some of the less obvious points about how they are calculated.  I found this PDF informative and useful.  If you are not one who likes to read PDFs you can get all the same information from the collection of video files that Gottfried narrates.

It is worth noting that Gottfried's narration is very clear and easy to understand and the quality of the video encoding is very clear and well paced.  I only had basic experience of Blender Internal Point Density Textures and found it very easy to follow Gottfried's explanations of Cycles Point Density Textures.  I think that if you have never used Point Density Textures before you will also have no problems understanding and following Gottfrieds explanations.

There are 4 videos supplied covering various Point Density Texture based special effects:

1. Basic Point Density Setup
2. Stylized Flame
3. Ocean Of Spheres
4. Smokey

The first video shows how to setup a Point Density Texture from first principles.  Showing you the basics of how to get started with them.

The video then moves on to making a logo illuminated by Point Density Textures.  Also covered is baking and turning Point Density Textures into images which can then be composited.  If you have never used the turbulence force field modifier this is used to achieve random movement of Point Density Textures.

 

It is surprising with just some very simple settings and modifiers the quality of the effect Gottfried achieved.

After the logo was completed the next thing that is demonstrated is using Point Density Textures to place them inside glass jars that can be effected by various light absorption and scatting effects.

The second video covers the creations of a plasma flame like effect which can surround and object and give it a flaming look.

Various modifiers and weight painting techniques are covered to achieve these effects, all well explained and demonstrated.

The third video takes a different approach from the previous two in that it shows how to emulate Point Density Texture like effects without actually using Point Density Textures.  This can help with rendering speed and memory usage.

The video shows how to take a collection of Dupli-Objects and place the Blender logo across them and have those spheres animated to morph into the Blender logo when the camera moves to the correct position.  The compositor, and the displacement modifiers and various other features of Blender are used to achieve this effect.

In this video there were some very clever techniques and tips covered.  Of particular note was the tip that you can use the compositor viewer node to save altered images without effecting their native resolution.  Another cool little piece of information was the coverage of how to use the From Dupli tickable option to project an image texture across a collection of Dupli-Objects.  There was also so tips and tricks regarding the use of the RGB curves node.   All useful pieces of information which I did not know about.

The forth and final video covers using Point Density Textures to create thin wispy smoke that looks similar to how tabaco smoke would look that is animated.

One stand out point that I did not know in this video was the technique for baking particles that follow a path with the Bake Action feature with Visual Keying active to get particle trails which looks smooth.  I don't know if this is a Blender bug or a feature but, it is still very useful to know how to get around the issue.

All in all an excellent product that is reasonably priced and very well described.

If you are looking for how to learn Point Density Textures or just want the Blend files for making your own versions of the logos for your own products then Gottfried's latest product is for you.

Review Score 95%

Enrico Valenza - Blender Cycles Materials & Textures Cookbook 3rd Edition - Ebook Review

Another day another Ebook reviewed in my recent catch up session to clear the backlog of unreviewed books that I have left to read through.

This time around it's a book by Enrico Valenza a very experienced Blenderhead who has written multiple books for Blender.

This is Enrico's 3rd book from his "Blender Cycles Materials & Textures Cookbook" series.

Unsurprisingly given the title of his book, it covers using Blender Cycles to create material and texture node setups in Cycles to achieve various different styles and types of materials that can be applied to objects.

Because this book is presented in the form of a cookbook it presents it's contents as a series of recipes, each recipe describing a particular method for achieving a particular visual effect in Blender Cycles.  Once the recipes have been documented the book then explains the recipes in detail showing why it was created the way it was and what the advantages/disadvantages of the recipes are.

Given that the information in this book is in recipe form, it is important that the recipes are accurate and as far as I was able to determine they are very accurate, there did not seem to be any silly errors.  This is unsurprising as the reviewers for this book were all very experienced Blender users.

Product Specifications:

• Name : Blender Cycles Materials & Textures Cookbook 3rd Edition
• Author : Enrico Valenza
• Price : £22.78 (on 10th March 2015)
• Pages : 400
• Format : Ebook
• Shop URL : https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-creative/blender-cycles-materials-and-textures-cookbook-third-edition

There are lots of recipes described in this book (40+) covering many different areas of material and texture creation. This is one of the reasons the page count for the book is 400 pages.

The 400 pages are split up into 9 chapters which cover very broad areas:

• 1 - Overview of Materials in Cycles
• 2 - Managing Cycles Materials
• 3 - Creating Natural Materials in Cycles
• 4 - Creating Man-made Materials in Cycles
• 5 - Creating Complex Natural Materials in Cycles
• 6 - Creating More Complex Man-made Materials
• 7 - Subsurface Scattering in Cycles
• 8 - Creating Organic Materials
• 9 - Special Materials 

The introductory text in the book takes some time to explain the major differences between Blender Internal render and Blender Cycles.  Although this book is aimed at a Blender user with some familiarity with Blender, if you are completely new to Blender you will be able to follow along while reading.

The versions of Blender covered in the text range from version 2.71 to 2.73, so if you are using older versions of Blender you may notice some differences between the book and your version of Blender.

All the recipes in the book come with the resultant Blend files, so if you do not want to follow along and just pick apart blend file to see how to achieve the various effects you can do so.  The blend files are available on the Packt Publishing website.

Chapter 1 - Starts with a basic introduction to some of the terms that are used with Blender Cycles and details how to setup and activate Blender Cycles render so that you can use it on your projects.  The advantages and disadvantages of Cycles are covered in brief.  As is the advantages and disadvantages of using Cycles Rendering on a Cpu/Gpu.  Followed by a quick example of how to use Blender Cycles Node setups to affect rendering.

How to improve render quality and remove noise is covered so as to allow you to get better results from your renders in a shorter amount of time.

Procedural textures are explained and demonstrated using various basic nodes, as is the bump and normal texture nodes.

World Materials setup is covered as well as the often asked question of how to make the background transparent in renders.  The coverage of how to use environment textures and sky textures was very easy for me to understand and I think will save newer Blender users a lot of time.

Various options of the Lightpath node are covered which allow the user to only have certain elements that are visible in a scene show up in a final render.

Ambient Occlusion is described and there was a useful section describing what is and is not taken into account for material properties when Ambient Occlusion is being generated.

Blender Cycles Mesh Lighting types are covered and contrasted to the lights that are used with Blender Internal.  The basics of how to control the amount, color and weather light is emitted from both or only a single side of a mesh light is explained, as is setting a mesh light up to light a scene but not have the mesh itself visible in a scene.

Having gone though the more basic properties of materials and textures the chapter moves on to Blender Cycles support for volumetrics and how to use them to achieve some simple but interesting looking effects.

And finally for this chapter using textures to enable displacement of meshes is covered.  Be aware that when this book was written this feature was still experimental so may change in the way it works.

Chapter 2 - Goes over some of the major ways to make your workflow with Blender Cycles more organized and efficient by showing you how to arrange Blender's interface to make it more responsive when using Cycles.

Topics such as setting up new screens, altering and saving a new defaults file is covered.  More basic but none the less very useful advice such as giving materials and textures informative names is covered.

More advanced method of organizing elements in Blender are also covered such as Node Groups, Layout Frames, Coloring of Nodes and importing and exporting elements into and out of Blender.

I learned that you could use ctrl+p to parent nodes into frames which I wasn't aware of.

Chapter 3 - With the basic concepts covered the book then moves on to the process of taking the information from the previous chapters and creating usable materials.

Specifically in this chapter the creation of Natural Materials is the purpose.

The first material that is created is a rock material which is created with image textures and combinations of bump maps.  I think this is the first book that I have read that details using the Box Blending method to achieve good texturing results without having to UV Unwrap a mesh.

After explaining how to make a rock texture with image textures the book then explains how to make a rock texture entirely using procedural texturing methods.

Where there is rock there is often sand which is handy as the next recipe covered is how to make a simple sand material, again using procedural texturing methods.  Another handy tip was shown describing how to make the materials generic and tweakable using Node Groups with alterable options.

By this point in the book the node setups and recipes can be somewhat involved and you will be glad that you have access to the blend files.

Next in the recipe list is a very simple and basic method for making a rocky ground type texture.  Not the best looking but is very simple and quick.

If you are getting bored of all the rock based materials then have no fear the book moves on to explaining the softer material of snow and how to create it using procedural textures and translucency.

Snow being a material that only generally looks right with SSS applied it can be slow to render, so usefully a method of faking SSS using translucency is described.

One material that is often requested by Blender users, is a good method for making a material that looks similar to how ice would look.  So an ice recipe is provided.  It's not the most advanced ice material ever but it is good enough and since you have the blend files you can always tweak it as you see fit to get the results you require.

Chapter 4 - Concentrates on creating materials which look man made specifically:

• Generic Plastic
• Bakelite
• Expanded Polystyrene
• Glassy Polystyrene (clear hard plastic)
• Rubber
• Antique Bronze
• Configurable Metal
• Rusty Metal
• Wooden Material

Chapter 5 - Covers creating more complex and larger scale materials.

If you have used Blender for any length of time you will often want to have a quick way of generating large scenes with ocean water.  Blender has an ocean water feature, but it is not the most flexible feature.  So instead the book documents a method which gives an ocean which is created manually using various Cycles Nodes to increase flexibility.

After creating the ocean surface obviously you need to create a material which can represent what the environment looks like when you are under the ocean, so the book moves on to creating an under water environment material.

Rendering a underwater scene using volumetrics can be very slow so a method is used which fakes the volumetric effect.

While in previous sections of the book materials such as snow and rock have been described, combing these types of materials to form a shader which creates mountains which have rock and snow on them and reacts to the height/angles of the mountain surfaces to determine where snow should be is described.

Finally for this chapter we go out of this world and a recipe for creating a render of earth as seen from space is demonstrated, using a combination of image textures and various other types of image maps to create elements such as land maps, clouds and water sections of the earth render.  There is no outer atmosphere but the earth shader looks good at a quick glance.  The techniques shown here can be used with many different types of texturing tasks, especially with regard to unwrapping a UV Sphere.

Chapter 6 - Covers creation of 4 materials:

• Cloth Pattern Shader
• Synthetic Sponge
• Leather
• Spaceship Hull Shader

According to the book these are more complex man made material types.  While I can't comment of the complexity, they are useful material types to know how to make.

The Spaceship hull shader is the standout recipe in this chapter and shows some very clever techniques to use very simple textures to displace a torus to make a futuristic looking flying torus craft.  Also covered is a way to apply decals to the craft.

Chapter 7 - Subsurface Scattering In Cycles chapter covers various features of Blender's SSS tool and details most of the SSS node control values explaining how to use them.  Because SSS is slow to render the chapter explains various techniques to fake the look of SSS.  For this the translucent shader is use as well as the Dirty Vertex feature and the Ray Length Light Path node.  They together help to achieve SSS in efficient ways and for the most part look very similar to real SSS.  If you are ok with the slow speed real SSS is also covered.

Chapter 8 - This chapter covers creation of shaders for living organic materials:

• Blobby Skin Shader
• Wasp Chitin
• Irridescent Beetle Material
• Tree Bark
• Tree Leaves
• Human Skin
• Alien Grey Skin
• Fur And Hair

 

The Tree material was interesting to see how it worked, the book also had a handy method of getting rid of seams on the tree branches.  The skin shader looks nice but I can't say how accurate it is compared to real skin.  I also liked the fur/hair material, as it gave a nice effect and I haven't seen enough coverage of Cycles fur or hair in many books, so it's good to see it mentioned.

Chapter 9 covers a grab bag of materials which didn't fit into other chapters, such as:

• Fire
• Smoke
• Materials that take depth into account
• Shadeless Materials

Fire and Smoke have got a lot more flexible in recent versions of Blender Cycles and it has also gotten easier and faster to create.  The book initially shows you how to make fire and smoke using the Quick Effect method and then shows the manual way to create the same material.  This helps to understand how it all works behind the scene.  The fire and smoke effect looks pretty good for a static image render.

I really liked the depth based material effects and they were surprisingly easy to create compared to most of the other mentioned materials in the book.

As any book on material in Cycles must do there is a recipe for creating clouds.  Which with some tweaking could be very useful.

All in all given the large range of material recipes described by this book there is highly likely to be some recipes that you find useful and will want to use.  Yes some of the materials are a little simple and some could be made to look better with some tweaking.  But on the whole I like how most of the recipes look.

Cycles has improved a lot with its supported materials and different node types, that it supports, making it easier and easier to make complex looking surface and depth based materials.  This book does a good job of showing off Blender Cycles power.

This book is well worth getting if you don't have the older editions and even if you do there is enough in this new one to make it worth purchasing.

Review Score 93%

Gordon Fisher - Blender 3D Basics - Second Edition - Ebook Review

I had some free time recently so I decided to try and cram in some book reviews.

This time around I am reviewing "Blender 3D Basics" Second Edition by Gordon Fisher.  Those of you that have long memories will remember that I previously reviewed the first version of this book and was impressed with it.

This second version is an update of the first version of book that covers updates in Blender.  Though the updates are somewhat limited as at least for the basics of using Blender things have not changed all that much.

This version of the book has a larger page count and goes into slightly more details and covers more topics relating to the basics of Blender.

Product Specifications:

• Name : Blender 3D Basics - Second Edition
• Author : Gordon Fisher
• Price : £25.18 (on 5th March 2015)
• Pages : 526
• Format : Ebook
• Shop URL : https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-creative/blender-3d-basics-second-edition

 

For those that are unaware the book is another of Packt Publishing Beginners series of books.  This means that the book is squarely aimed at the beginner Blender user, very advanced features are not covered in any great depth.  What this book does do is cover the basics in a good amount of depth so that you have a very solid foundation in understanding Blender's most important features.

All the resouces such as Blend files and graphics for each of the projects are supplied on the website when you purchase the book.

The writing style in this book was very clear and easy to understand and the book was filled with many clear and easy to see and interpret pictures that were in full color.

The book teaches Blender features using a series of different projects which the book sets as tasks for you to carry out.  At the end of each task a summary is given as to what you achieved and why you did the tasks that way.  A run down of all the shortcuts and tools used is also listed at the end of each project for reference.

As well as showing you how to achieve certain tasks the book also has a good amount of explanation in terms of theory.  So theory of various topics such as animation, lighting, rendering, layout and compositing and many other areas are covered.  Once the theory is covered the book then switches to practical explanations to create projects.

Note that there is very little coverage of Blender Cycles, but this is considered and advanced topic, so if you want Cycles information this is not the book for you.

If you liked the first version of this book or have never read the first version, you will like this newer book, especially if you are new to Blender or 3D in general.  Definite improvement on the first book.

Review Score 90%

Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook Ebook Review

Normally I try to keep on top of all the Blender books and review them in a timely maner, but sometimes I either run out of time or as in this case forget that I have read the book but not posted a review about said book.

Normally I would skip posting a review of such a book if it was this late but since with a few exceptions most of the information in the book is still applicable in newer versions of Blender, a review seems in order.

So the first thing to mention about the book is that it is by Enrico Valenza, as far as I can remeber I haven't previously read any books from him before.  A scan of Google reveals that as well as this books he is also working on two other books on Blender, which will be released soon.

Back to this book, for those that have seen some of my other book reviews you will notice that this book is another one of Packt Publishing's Cookbook series of books.  These books takes the approach of teaching a subject by presenting topics as a series of small recipes to explain how particular features of Blender work and how you can use those features to produce complex effects and results.

This books covers recipes which demonstrate how to use Blender Cycles material and texturing system.  The Blender Cycles material and texturing system is mostly controlled using a series of nodes which when connected together control how the materials and textures that node are applied to will be displayed when rendering and even when viewed in the 3D Viewport of Blender.  The node based system of material and texture creation is very different from how older versions of Blender (Blender Internal) created materials and textures.  The node based system is much more intuitive and easier to control and as a result is generally much more powerful.

There are roughly 50 recipes covered in this book, covering creation of many different types of materials and textures, as well as lighting properties.

Each recipes it presented in a fixed format, first the recipes are presented to the user and then after the instructions on how to implement them are explained the book then explains why they were constructed the way the were and a detailed rundown on the different parts of the recipe are given.

Product Specifications:

• Name : Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook
• Authors :  Enrico Valenza
• Price : £20.38 (on 27th Feb 2015)
• Pages : 280
• Format : EBook
• Website : https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-creative/blender-26-cycles-materials-and-textures-cookbook

On the whole the recipes as they are presented are clear and reasonably easy to understand.  I in general could understand the instructions given and why particular recipes achieved the effects they did, one or two of the recipes were not clear to me why they worked, but they none the less did.  So this is probably my fault for being dense and not rereading the descriptions more closely.

All the Blend files and resources required to carry out the recipes are included with the book.  Even if you don't read through the entire book and do all the recipes manually, having the Blend file is very useful as it allows you to pick them apart and experiment to see how they work.

It also helps that Enrico has a clear and easy to understand writing style.  Often Packt Publishing books are not the best edited or easy to read but in this case there is no problem.

The book covers Blender 2.6x series of Blender but even with the newer versions of Blender (currently at 2.73) the information contained within is still useful and the Blend files will for the most part still work.  In fact in newer versions of Blender it will often be even easier to carryout the recipes as there will be newer nodes which negate some of the steps used in the recipes as presented in the text.

So even though the book is getting on in age (in Blender development time scals), the information is still largely accurate the book is still well worth getting.

Review Score 80%

CG Masters - Character Creation Volume 3.5 - Cycles Convert

I was contacted by CG Masters and asked if I would review one of their latest Blender training products "Character Creation Volume 3.5 - Cycles Convert".

Those of you that have read my previous reviews of CG Masters products know that they have created quite a collection of high quality video training materials.  All of them have been very well made and very informative.

The instructor this time around is Greg Zaal a very accomplished Blenderhead who knows his way around lighting, shading and texturing in Blender.

Greg is a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer.  Those of you that follow Greg's Adaptive Samples blog will have seen that he produces numerous useful tutorials and articles on the use of Blender and 3D in general.  He also has a portfolio website at http://portfolio.gregzaal.com/ where you can see more examples of his work.

As you can guess from the title of the product this is a continuation in the series of the 3rd Volume series.  The 3 earlier volumes covered the different aspects of creating a Ninja character in 3D using Blender.

The previous volumes in the series are:

• Character Creation Volume 1 - Modeling
• Character Creation Volume 2 - Rigging
• Character Creation Volume 3 - Texturing

Product Specifications:

• Name : Character Creation Volume 3.5 - Cycles Convert
• Author : Greg Zaal
• Price : $20 (on 6th Dec 2014)
• Runtime : 2hrs 29mins
• Format : Video
• Website : http://www.cgmasters.net/training-dvds/character-creation-volume-3-5-cycles-convert/

As has come to be expected from a CG Masters title the quality of the material is very good.  All the training material is accessible from within a web browser or if you want to access the training videos and resources directly you are able to.  All of the resource files and blend files that Greg creates are provided with the product, so if you wish to follow along with Greg you will be able to.

The videos are encoded very clearly and are very easy to watch.  Even more of a surprise and possibly a first as far as I can remember, is the videos are encoded in webm format which not only gives very good video quality but also means that you will not need flash installed in your web browser to view these videos as they are natively supported by Firefox and Chrome web browsers.

The Cycles Convert product is a little different from the previous volumes in the series as it is more of an extension to the previous 3rd Volume which covered texturing of the Ninja character model.  This means that the runtime of the videos is only 2 hours and 29 minutes, but Greg packs a lot of information into that time and the cost of the volume is also significantly lower.

The texturing in the 3rd volume was however done using Blender Internal render.  In this 3.5 Volume the texturing, shading and lighting will all be converted so as to use the Blender Cycles rendering engine.  This results in the Ninja character having better looking shading and lighting and also shows how much easier it is to carry out the task of lighting/shading and texturing in Blender Cycles than it is in Blender Internal.

This is not a beginners volume if you have never used Blender before I think you will struggle to keep up with Greg, but if you have experience with Blender Internal render you should easily be able to keep up.  If you have never used the Cycles Render before, do not worry as Greg explains the basics of how to use the Blender Cycles render.

This volume has 7 chapters and some of the chapters are split into multiple parts.  This means that the videos range in length between 5 minutes and roughly 20 minutes meaning that the videos are very much manageable in length:

• 0. Introduction
• 1. Building a Basic Material
• 2. Texturing Overview
• 3.1. Lighting Setup
• 3.2. Fresnel
• 3.3. Subsurface Scattering
• 3.4. Metals
• 3.5. Clothing
• 4.1. Sai
• 4.2. Goggles
• 4.3. Eyes
• 4.4. Hair
• 5. Node Groups
• 6. Render Optimization

All of the chapters to me were very informative though personally the parts I liked the most were:

The video sections that covered the use of the Node Wranger which Greg helped develop.  This Blender Addon really helped speed up Greg's work flow when demonstrating and using various Blender Cycles Node features.  After seeing this in action it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people are wondering why Node Wrangler is not by default active in the Cycles Node editor.  Amazing to watch.

The video sections that covered how to make a faked glass shader using a Transparency Node, Glossy Node and Fresnel Node was another awesome piece to watch;  I can't say I entirely understand why it works (though this could just be me being super slow on the uptake), but I will be stealing that trick, plus it's an awesome quick way of making bubble like surface materials and it renders a lot faster than an actual real Glass Shader Node.

The coverage of the Hair Node also stood out as I think it's the first time I have seen the Cycles Hair node usage explained so well and easily.

If you are a big into Node Groups use, you will also appreciate the section on Node Groups as Greg does a very detailed run down on how to create and manage them.  I espcially liked the explanation of how to change the default values of Node Groups and the tip on using the Fake Users option to keep the Node Groups from being deleted.

And the final section that I found useful was the section on Render Optimizations.  It's unfortunately true that although Blender Cycles can render gorgeous looking scenes, all the awesome comes often at the cost of speed, so anything that can help the user speed up their renders is welcome.

Greg details a number of tips and techniques for speeding up Blender Cycles renders.  His explanation of how to use Multiple Importance Sampling to reduce noise in scenes, and the use of the Light Path Node Camera ray feature to also reduce noise and render times were really clever.

So if you are wanting to convert a modeled character of yours from a Blender Internal shaded character into a Blender Cycles shaded one, this is the video for you.  It cover all the nodes you need to get the job done efficiently.  While it is true that not every node or technique is covered in these videos, the ones that are you will almost certainly find to be the most used and useful.

Excellent tutorial and a good addition to the previous volumes, well worth the money.

Review Score 90%

Aske Olsson & Rasmus Vos - Git Version Control Cookbook

If you have been or are involved in activities such as programming/software engineering then GIT is a term you have likely come across very often.

GIT is a Version Control System, it allows you to keep track of changes in things weather those things be documents or computer code.  It allows you to control how those changes are applied, it allows for changes to be carried out by multiple people, who can be in different parts of the world. 

GIT is very powerful and fast and was developed by the same group of people who now maintain and extend the Linux Kernel.  So with such a group of power coders involved in GIT's creation it should be no surprise that GIT has such power and flexibility.

However as has been often quoted "With great power comes great responsibility.".

The above is also true of GIT, it's powerful but this can mean that a lot of the functionality of GIT is hidden in a spiders web of complex command line statements, and while the fundamental basics are not too hard to grasp, once you move beyond the basics GIT very quickly becomes very complex.  Anyone who has ever had to read the GIT reference manual will have an understanding of just how complex!

This is where "Git Version Control Cookbook" comes in, it is aimed at the GIT user who already knows the basic fundamentals of how to use GIT and wants to move on to the more intermediate/advanced uses of GIT.

Product Specifications:

• Name : Git Version Control Cookbook
• Authors : Aske Olsson & Rasmus Vos
• Price : £7.32 (on 1st Oct 2014)
• Pages : 340
• Format : EBook
• Website : https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/git-version-control-cookbook

The book does this by trying to clear  up a lot of the confusion surrounding GIT commands and how to use them.

Like all of the other Cookbook series of books from Packt Publishing the recipe, solution, explanation format is used.  A problem that needs to be addressed is identified, a solution is created, then an explanation of the arrived at solution is documented.

The range of different recipes that get explained and carried out in this book, range from reasonably simple to quite involved.  At the end of most of the recipes there are links to further information relating to most of the recipes if you want to take things further with a specific topic.  These were especially useful to me.

There are 340 pages in the book and a lot of recipes (90), so it will not be a quick read, and given the level of information contained within some of the recipes are quite dense, it would require someone who is a little rusty with GIT to reread and experiment with the recipes to fully grasp what is being achieved.

I am not a GIT expert so occasionally I did have to reread certain parts of the recipes and do a bit of Google searching to fully comprehend why some of the recipes worked.

It is important to note that the book is very well written the authors have good writing styles and everything was well explained, it's just that I rarely do anything even remotely as complex as some of the tasks described in this book.  If you are a more frequent user of GIT you will likely not have some of the confusions that I did.

Although GIT can be used as a general purpose Version Control System this book definitely has most of the recipes orientated towords tasks that a computer programmer would want to carry out, such as:

• Configuring GIT
• Admin Tasks
• Branching
• Merging
• Patching
• Obtaining Release Log Bug Fixes
• Various Other Things...

My favourite recipe was a simple one that showed you have to obtain a list of Bug Fixes for a software release using JGIT software repository.  And the other highlight for me was the coverage of how the Rebase command works.

Rebase is one topic that always causes me a lot of confusion so I was glad of a simple explanation of exactly what it is and why you would want to use it, and a good explanation of the pitfalls of it.

Another useful highlight for me was that the book didn't just stick to teaching how to use just GIT internal commands, it also covered how to extend GIT by using various external shell scripts, to make GIT even more flexible.

Another thing I found useful was that most of the recipes used real repositories of software to demonstrate various GIT commands on actual real open source software.

I think that maybe this book has two different audiences in mind.  The first is the one who has the basics of GIT under their belt and wants to expand their knowledge.  The other is the person who just wants to find a specific recipe to get a specific task done as quickly as possible.  While I think the first set of people will get more from this text than the second set, it is possible to use this book to just look up a specific recipe.

It is always a little difficult to rate books like this because in the end how useful the book is to you depends on weather the recipes achieve things you find useful.  But since the range of topics the recipes covered were quite large and in my opinion they are the sort of tasks every GIT user would need to know, there is likely to be something in this book that you will find useful to know if you are a GIT user.  For a full list of all the topics covered in this book checkout the website (https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/git-version-control-cookbook) for the book.

All in all this was an interesting and informative read, just remember that it is not a beginners GIT book, you will need familiarity with the basics of GIT to get the most out of this book.  For the price I really can't complain either 340 pages for just over £7 is a good deal.

Review Score 90%

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%