Learn 3D for Cheetah 3D v7 — online for free

https://loewald.com/c3dbook-v7

This is a quick hack, and it hasn't been styled properly yet. I also plan to make it downloadable as an ePub.

The book isn't finished yet, so there are some gaps here and there. Comments are welcome. I was going to integrate disqus but I have to pay to suppress ads.

I was also going to provide a donation link but couldn't get paypal to conceal my email address for some reason.
 
Thank you for putting this up. Another thing to add to the list of things I never seem to get around to :D

Only had a chance to read the intro, but I like the tone and style already.
 
https://loewald.com/c3dbook-v7

This is a quick hack, and it hasn't been styled properly yet. I also plan to make it downloadable as an ePub.

The book isn't finished yet, so there are some gaps here and there. Comments are welcome. I was going to integrate disqus but I have to pay to suppress ads.

I was also going to provide a donation link but couldn't get paypal to conceal my email address for some reason.
Hi,

I have your earlier V6 book and its superb, but I am puzzled by your reference to V7 having "Support for “dark mode” in High Sierra and Mojave.".

I can't have Mojave on my 2009 iMac and I understood that 'Dark Mode' is not available in High Sierra. I have tried the "defaults write -g NSWindowDarkChocolate -bool TRUE" hack, and it's better than nothing, but no where as good as real Dark Mode. Have I missed something?
 

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I wish I could upgrade my aging late 2013 iMac too.. it's showing its age with every app I use lol.. oh well, we just need to save our pennies. :)
 
I wish I could upgrade my aging late 2013 iMac too.. it's showing its age with every app I use lol.. oh well, we just need to save our pennies. :)
But Joel, the marvelous thing about Cheetah, is that, unlike Blender et al, it will run on my iMac and on Apple's antiquated GPUs and of course it has so many dedicated wonderful and talanted peeps to help.
 
That's a great thing about C3D, being a native mac app, it works great with I guess almost any mac, the interface is beautiful and coherent, and really easy to learn and use. We may not have the latest stuff but it's not bad either. I really like C3D and specially Falcon even in this first incarnation, I'm sure it will only get better.

The scripting (and script writers) also take this app to the next level.
 
The attached comments are primarily for the benefit of Learn 3D’s author Tonio Loewald. Anyone else may read the PDF and maybe it will prompt some other ideas to be posted on this thread.

I have the Version 6 edition of Learn 3D and I recommend it. We are fortunate to have a well-designed guide to help us discover the power within Cheetah 3D.
 

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Thanks for the comments Joel. I agree with pretty much everything you have to say, but — unfortunately — my time is not unlimited (in fact, I dumped the book on my website because I haven't had the time to fill the gaps I identified in the book and realized I was falling FURTHER behind over time).

One thing I may be able to do is publish the entire book as a GitHub repo and then allow folks to contribute via Pull Request (but that's asking a bit much).

I should be able to fold in the existing video tutorials and relevant into the appropriate sections.
 
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For those of us whose technical skills are limited to C3D models and forum posts, what are GitHub repos and Pull Requests? How readily can non-nerds utilize them to contribute?

Any archived videos or other instuctive materials would be great so long as they can be accessed as easily as Webpages or posts on the forum.
 
Github is a website which provides "version control" in the cloud. Think of version control as being like "track changes" in Microsoft Word, only much more powerful and versatile.

In simple terms, you can put content in a Github Repo and — if it's in Markdown format, which Learn 3D is — it will render as normal readable text.

Here's an example (I just open-sourced the entire book — you're welcome):

https://github.com/tonioloewald/Learn-3D-with-Cheetah-3D/blob/master/docs/10.7_UV_Mapping.md

Now, suppose you found a problem in this section. You could actually fix it yourself!
  1. If you don't have a Github account, create one (the accounts are free).
  2. Now log in and go to the page. You can click on the pencil icon (top-right) to edit it right there.
  3. When you're done you can submit your changes as a "Pull Request". In effect you're saying, "I just made a new version of your book that's better than your version. If you like you can PULL my changes and add them to yours."
What's really cool is that anyone can do this, and more than one "pull request" can be in flight at a time. There's even mechanisms for resolving overlapping and conflicting changes. But it the changes need to be approved. Anyone can be made an "approver" and the repo can even be transferred from owner to owner OR forked. (E.g. if I get hit by a bus, or you think I'm a jerk, you can make your own "fork" of the book and control it.) That's the benefit of open source. The downside is that no-one needs to pay me to get the book. Oh well!

If you remember the time when we tried a Wiki and it was quickly defaced by spammers and porn sites, the great thing about Github as that any given version of a repo is owned by someone, but if you despise the owner you can clone the repo and fix it yourself. Also, Markdown is a much nicer language for writing documents that Wiki's markup language.

The repo includes all the source necessary to build the software (web app) version of the book. So you could clone the entire thing and host it on your own site. Martin could make it a tab of the Cheetah 3D website if he wanted to. (The automatic indexing system I built into it is pretty good, but it only indexes headings down to a certain level — I had plans to write a free text retrieval engine but only so many hours in a day.)

Aside

If you're interested, the first version of the book was written using Pages — which I love — but its ePub export had a massive bug which caused images to be omitted beyond a certain point. I ended up having to completely move the book to VoodooPad to fix the problem as quickly as possible, and contacting every single person who had paid for the book and getting them fixed copies (luckily not many copies had sold yet). VoodooPad had its own problems and produced ugly output, so I moved to Ulysses for 2nd/3rd Edition. Then Ulysses switched to a subscription model while not fixing glaring issues that had been annoying me for years (e.g. still no decent table support). Eventually, I wrote bookify to convert the exported output from Ulysses and convert it into a directory full of images and markdown files (one per major subheading) along with a documentation.json file in the same basic format as bindinator's documentation.json file. This allowed me to use a lightly customized version of bindinator's documentation component to host the book as a website.

Along the way, I've also tried going back to Pages (which eventually fixed the bug that drove me away), tried Microsoft Word, and also dabbled with iBooks Author. While writing Learn 3D was fun and rewarding, and it sold FAR more copies than I ever expected, it's a labor of love and I really don't have time to do it justice.
 
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One thing I'd love to do is switch over to the orange color scheme I created for the c3dbook site. Bindinator actually has a theme editor (and the css file supports dark mode) so if anyone wants to compile a set of nicer css colors and do a pull request…
 
Hi podperson,
sorry for the late reply and thank you very much for shading your "Learn 3D for Cheetah 3D v7" for free. I haven't read it yet but it looks really nice and I'm sure it will be very helpful for many.:)(y)

Bye
Martin
 
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