Getting Started with Mudbox 2013

Sculpting software has changed the face of the 3D industry. Whether you are creating a character for the next Avatar movie or adding details to a post apocalyptic city in The Last of Us, 3D sculpting has become an essential tool for creating a level of realism in digital art that was much harder to achieve in the past. A couple of things that make Mudbox a better choice than other sculpting software is its ease of use, its industry-leading 3D painting tools, and its solid integration with other Autodesk products, which includes industry-standard software for 3D modeling and animation. Mudbox is also the first software to integrate vector displacement map extraction. This technology takes texture mapping one more step forward, similar to the introduction of normal maps which sparked the era of "Next-Gen" games. All in all, Mudbox is a powerful art creation tool that is only going to get better and more integrated with the industry's leading software.

In this article by Jeremy Roland, author of Mudbox 2013 Cookbook we will cover:

• Installing Mudbox 2013 documentation
• Setting up hotkeys
• Increasing the resolution on your model
• Bookmarking the camera view
• Downloading and enabling stamps, stencils, and base meshes from the Internet
• Adding and adjusting your image planes
• Sculpting on different subdivision levels effectively
• Recording a movie while you work in Mudbox
• Setting up colors and other preferences
• Setting up your Wacom tablet
• Working in expert mode

Management of SOA Composite Applications

Developers typically create composite applications or simply composites that are packaged into single, deployable JAR files. These applications can contain any number of service components that include BPEL or BPMN processes, Mediator services, human tasks and workflows, and business rules. Composites include logic and code that form the foundation of SOA-based integrations. Though the design and development of composites are not the ultimate responsibility of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g administrator, the deployment, monitoring, and management of them are.

In this article, the authors Ahmed Aboulnaga and Arun Pareek of the book Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook will discuss the concepts that enable you to manage these composites, and cover the following areas in more detail:

• Managing composite lifecycles
• Structuring composite deployments with partitions
• Setting up ant for automated composite build management
• Promoting code, using configuration plans
• Understanding and configuring composite audit levels

A Quick Tour Of Ephesoft

Ephesoft has two user interfaces. One is intended for use by operators to review and validate Ephesoft's classification, separation, and extraction. The other is intended for use by system administrators in the configuration of Ephesoft. Not all aspects of Ephesoft can be configured through the administrative interface, however. For some of the configuration, administrators will need to use a text editor to modify files in Ephesoft's installation directory.

Before we begin, it is helpful to understand some commonly-used terms. A batch or a batch instance is a set of document images that are processed together. A batch class is a set of rules for processing a batch.

This article by Pat Myers, Ike Lavas, Michael Muller, and Clifford Laurin, authors of Intelligent Document Capture with Ephesoft, will provide you with a brief introduction to Ephesoft's user interfaces:

• The administrative user interface
• The operator user interface

Overview of FIM 2010 R2

Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 (FIM 2010 R2) is not one product, but a family of products working together to mitigate the challenges regarding Identity Management.

Microsoft's Forefront Identity Manager simplifies enterprise Identity Management for end users by automating admin tasks and integrating the infrastructure of an enterprise with strong authentication systems.

In this article by Kent Nordström, author of Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook, we will get an overview of FIM 2010 R2.

In this article, we will cover:

• The history of FIM 2010 R2
• FIM Synchronization Service (FIM Sync)
• FIM Service
• FIM Portal
• FIM Reporting
• FIM Certificate Management (FIM CM)
• Licensing

Publishing the project in various formats using Adobe Captivate 6

In this article by Damien Bruyndonckx, author of Mastering Adobe Captivate 6, we will focus on making the project available to the outside world by publishing it in various formats.

Publishing the movie is the process by which we make our Captivate projects available to the outside world. Most of the time, we'll publish our movies in the Adobe Flash format or in the HTML5 format so that any student can enjoy the content of our online course across devices. However, Captivate can also publish the movie in many other formats

Publishing

So far, we have been working in a .cptx file, which is the default native file type of Captivate. The .cptx file format is great when creating and designing our projects, but it has two major disadvantages:

• It can become very large. Consequently, it is diffcult for us to upload the file on a website and for the student to download and view it.
• Opening a .cptx file requires Captivate to be installed on the computer system.

Publishing a Captivate movie is converting (the proper word is Compiling) the .cptx file to a format that can be easily downloaded and viewed by our students. The primary format to publish our projects is the .swf format . swf (pronounced swif) stands for ShockWave Flash. It is the file format used by the free Adobe Flash player plugin installed in more than 98 percent of the computers connected to the Internet. It has two advantages as compared to the .cptx file:

• A .swf file is usually much lighter than its .cptx counterpart, making it much easier to upload and download across the Internet.
• Any browser equipped with the free Adobe Flash plugin is able to open and play the .swf file. This makes it incredibly easy to deploy our Captivate courses.

That being said, the .swf format has some major disadvantages:

• It requires the Adobe Flash Player plugin to be installed. If, for whatever reason, the plugin is not available, the .swf file cannot be played back.
• There is no more Flash Player plugin available for mobile devices. Consequently, a .swf file cannot be played back on a Smartphone or on a Tablet.

That's why other publishing formats are available in Captivate. In Captivate 6, the most effective alternative to the .swf format is to publish the project in HTML5. When published to HTML5, the project can be played back in any modern browser without the need for an extra plugin. HTML5-enabled projects can also be played back on mobile devices including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch! HTML5 also has its caveats. At the time of this writing, (June 2012) HTML5 is still under development. Consequently, some features of Captivate are not yet supported in HTML5.

In this article, we will explore and discuss the various publishing options at our disposal in Captivate.

Getting Started on UDK with iOS

The UDK iOS Game Development Beginner’s Guide takes a clear, step-by-step approach to building a small third-person shooter game using the Unreal Development Kit with plenty of examples on how to create a game that is uniquely your own.

In this article by John P. Doran and Christos Gatzidis, authors of UDK iOS Game Development Beginner's Guide, we'll:

• Learn about the Unreal Engine and what we expect to create
• Install UDK on our computer
• Go through an overview of UDK's directories
• Download and install UDK Remote
• Match the Mobile Previewer settings with your iOS device
• Describe the project we are going to be creating

HBase Administration, Performance Tuning

Performance is one of the most interesting characteristics of an HBase cluster's behavior. It is a challenging operation for administrators, because performance tuning requires deep understanding of not only HBase but also of Hadoop, Java Virtual Machine Garbage Collection (JVM GC), and important tuning parameters of an operating system.

The structure of a typical HBase cluster is shown in the following diagram:

There are several components in the cluster—the ZooKeeper cluster, the HBase master node , region servers, the Hadoop Distributed File System(HDFS) and the HBase client.

The ZooKeeper cluster acts as a coordination service for the entire HBase cluster, handling master selection, root region server lookup, node registration, and so on. The master node does not do heavy tasks. Its job includes region allocation and failover, log splitting, and load balancing. Region servers hold the actual regions; they handle I/O requests to the hosting regions, flush the in-memory data store (MemStore) to HDFS, and split and compact regions. HDFS is the place where HBase stores its data files (StoreFile) and write ahead logs (WAL). We usually have an HBase region server running on the same machine as the HDFS DataNode, but it is not mandatory.

The HBase client provides APIs to access the HBase cluster. To communicate with the cluster, clients need to find the region server holding a specific row key range; this is called region lookups. HBase has two system tables to support region lookups—the -ROOT- table and the .META. table.

The -ROOT-table is used to refer to regions in the .META.table, while the .META.table holds references to all user regions. First, the clients query ZooKeeper to find the -ROOT-table location (the region server where it is deployed); they then query the -ROOT-table, and subsequently the .META.table, to find the region server holding a specific region. Clients also cache region locations to avoid querying ZooKeeper, -ROOT-, and .META.tables every time. With this background knowledge, we will describe how to tune HBase to gain better performance, in this article.

Besides HBase itself, other tuning points include Hadoop configurations, the JVM garbage collection settings, and the OS kernel parameters. These are as important as tuning HBase itself. We will also include recipes to tune these configurations, in this article.

In this article, by Yifeng Jiang, author of HBase Administration Cookbook, we will cover:

• Setting up Hadoop to spread disk I/O
• Using a network topology script to make the Hadoop rack-aware
• Mounting disks with noatimeand nodiratime
• Setting vm.swappinessto 0 to avoid swap
• Java GC and HBase heap settings
• Using compression
• Managing compactions
• Managing a region split