Valenza - Blender 2.6 Cycles, Materials and Textures Cookbook

Enrico Valenza , also known on the Web as "EnV", is an Italian freelance illustrator, mainly collaborating with publishers, such as Mondadori Ragazzi and Giunti, as a cover artist for sci-fi and fantasy books.

He graduated at Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona (Italy) and later was a student of illustrator and painter Giorgio Scarato.

When he started to work, computers weren't that popular among the masses, and he spent the first 15 years of his career doing illustrations with traditional media, usually on cardboards. Particularly, he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly esteemed for advertising work.

But this was only until the moment Jurassic Park came to the theaters: he then decided to buy a computer and try his hand at this "computer graphic" thing everyone was talking about. Totally self-taught in the many aspects of CG, it was his encounter with the open source philosophy that actually opened a brand new world of possibilitiesin particular, Blender.

In 2005, he won the Suzanne Awards for "Best animation, original idea, and story" with the animation New Penguoen 2.38 .

In 2006, he joined the Orange Team for the last two weeks of production in Amsterdam, to help in finalizing the shots of the first open source CG-animated short movie produced by the Blender Foundation, named Elephants Dream .

From 2007 to 2008, he was a Lead Artist in the Peach Project Team for the production of Big Buck Bunny , the Blender Foundation's second open movie.

From 2010 to 2011, he was an Art Director at CINECA (Bologna, Italy) for the Museo della Citt di Bologna project, that is, the production of a stereoscopic CG-animated documentary made in Blender and explaining Bologna's history.

Being also a Blender Certified Trainer, he collaborates as a CG artist with Italian production studios that have decided to switch their pipeline to the open source.

He uses Blender almost on a daily basis for his illustration jobs, rarely to have the illustration rendered straight by the 3D package, more often as a starting point for painting over with other open source applications such as The Gimp or, more recently, MyPaint.

He has presented several presentations and workshops about Blender and its use in productions.

I would like to say thanks to my family: my father Giuseppe and my mother Licia, for giving me the possibility to follow what I always thought was my path in life, my wonderful wife Micaela and my beautiful daughter Sara, just for being there and encouraging me while writing this book.

Then, I would like to thank, obviously, Ton Roosendaal for creating Blender and Brecht Van Lommel for Cycles. I would also like to thank all the blender-heads at the BlenderArtist and at the Kino3d forums for all the testing, experimentations, explanations, and examples about the Cycles features and materials creation that were (and still are) often posted almost at the same time they are implemented in the software. Especially on BlenderArtist.org, there is a very long and informative thread at this address, which, at this moment, has already reached 540 pages:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-rendering

And another one at this address, which is already more than 200 pages long:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216866-Cycles-tests-the-new-blender-CPU-GPU-renderer-of-awesomeness

Ken Beyer is a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer, and at KatsBits.com has been providing tutorials, training, downloads, and other information and resources on using Blender for content creation and production relative to games and other real-time interactive products to hobbyists, amateur artists, Indie developers, and small studios for nearly 15 years.

KatsBits.com itself is a site and community dedicated to making game content and general game development using Blender 3D, where members can post questions, comments, and read information important for taking that next step from "gamer" to "creator".

He has served as a Technical Reviewer on (both full and partial reviews) the following books:

Darrin Lile is an animator, writer, and full-time faculty member in the Media Arts and Animation Program at The Art Institute of Wisconsin. He teaches courses in computer animation, including Principles of 3D Modeling, Materials and Lighting, Advanced Lighting and Texturing, and Advanced Modeling and Animation. He received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Film and Media Studies from the University of Kansas and has worked as a producer of educational films, as a sound editor for film and television, and as a computer security analyst. He currently lives in Wisconsin with his wife and children near the shores of Lake Michigan. Check out his latest work at www.darrinlile.com.