Blender 3D: Interview with Allan Brito

Blender is an open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation, capable of modeling, rendering, and animating 3D environments. Since Blender is completely free, everyone can download and use it immediately in commercial projects. It's not a shareware with limited tools, or time constraints; you can use it freely. In the past few years, the Blender user base has grown significantly. One of the positive aspects of Blender is its size—it is only 10 MB and we can even run it directly from a portable drive. Another great aspect of Blender is that we can use various Operating Systems such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, leaving us the choice of which one to use.

Packt spokesperson Meeba Abraham approached Allan Brito at the heart of this movement to understand his take on the future of Blender.

Blender 3D 2.49: Quick Start

This article by Allan Brito, author of Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery, will deal with all the basic aspects related to Blender, which will be useful for artists who have never had the chance to use Blender. We must learn the basics first before we get into more specific questions about modeling and rendering architectural visualizations and scenarios. It's very important to understand how object manipulation, creation, and editing works in Blender. This way, we will be able to work a lot faster and create better models and visualizations.

In this article, we will learn how to:

• Use the interface
• Set up the interface
• Select Objects
• Work with modes
• Transform objects
• Create objects
• Copy objects
• Work with the camera
• Rendering basics

Blender 2.5: Rigging the Torso

There are various ways of approaching the subject of rigging, and we're going to see a mix of solutions ranging from unique to adapted ideas by reverse-engineering some well known rigs available online, such as the ManCandy rig, Ludwig, or the Blender Foundation's open movie characters. While these solutions are not the only way to go, you can achieve quite satisfactory results and its building processes are far from being rocket science.

In this article by Virgilio Vasconcelos, author of Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook, we will cover the following topics:

• How to create a stretchy spine
• Rigging the pelvis
• Making your character breathe
• Controlling the neck and head

Blender 2.5: Detailed Render of the Earth from Space

Home sweet home. We've got a very beautiful planet to live in, with lots of beautiful landscapes to look at; but maybe the most beautiful ones are those that we can see in the pictures taken from the space. Those are really awesome. In this article by John E. Herreño, author of Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT, let's challenge ourselves and work to create an image resembling some of that beauty that we can see in nature.

Blender 2.49 Scripting: Shape Keys, IPOs, and Poses

The Blender API provides us with the means to define IPOs from scratch, enabling the definition of movements not easily re-created by setting key frames by hand. Thus there is more to IPOs than just driving one IPO by another one. Furthermore, Shape keys and poses are examples of (collections of) IPOs that are quite different from, for example, a location IPO. We will encounter both shape keys and poses later on in this article, but we will start off with looking at how we might define an IPO from scratch.

In this article by Michel Anders, author of Blender 2.49 Scripting, you will learn how to:

• Define IPOs
• Define shape keys on a mesh
• Define IPOs for those shape keys
• Pose armatures
• Group changes in poses into actions

(Other related articles on Blender 2.49 Scripting are listed at the end of this page.)

Blender 2.49 Scripting: Animating the Visibility of objects

There are many places where Python can be used in Blender. In this article by Michel Anders, author of Blender 2.49 Scripting, we will now look at scripts that may be used to act on certain events. These scripts come in two flavors—script links and space handlers. You will learn what script links and space handlers are and how they can be used to perform activities on each frame change in an animation. You also see how to associate additional information with an object, how to use script links to make an object appear or disappear by changing its layout or changing its transparency.

BlackBerry: BES Architecture and Implementation Planning

Planning is a key element of any IT implementation, but planning can only be accomplished with an understanding of the technical underpinnings of the proposed solution. In this article, authors Mitesh Desai and Dan Renfroe delve more deeply into the technical architecture of BES in order to provide you with an understanding of what’s under the hood. This article also covers the system requirements and pre-requisites for a BES implementation, including operating system, hardware, network, and database requirements.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5: Activating Devices and Users

The purpose of creating a BlackBerry Enterprise Server user is to assign a device to the user and then manage that device via policies. In this article by Mitesh Desai, author of BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5 Implementation Guide, we will be looking at activating devices and the various methods that are available to do so. We will create users on our BES system, and then assigning them Smartphone devices. We will be providing our Microsoft Exchange users access to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

We will look at creating a single user account so that we become familiar with the settings, but in a practical environment we would need a quicker way to create the users, especially if we have over 500 users in our organization. In the Lab, at the end of the article, we will be importing users to the BES.

BizTalk Application: Dynamics AX Message Outflow

In the previous article, BizTalk Application: Currency Exchange Rates, we took a look at the setup for sending data using AIF XML documents to AX. We can use the BizTalk adapter to retrieve data from Dynamics AX via this AIF module. This is done using the AIF Queue manager. Throughout Dynamics AX, there are Send electronically buttons that can allow you to push data into the AIF Queue with an Outbound direction. Similarly, asynchronous incoming messages have an Inbound direction parameter.

In this article by Carl Darski, author of Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration, we'll create a BizTalk application that retrieves messages from Dynamics AX 2009 via the AIF Queue.