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Blogs by Pat J Murphy
iBooks and 3D artwork 3/19/2016 4:56:30 PM
You may think that adding 3D artwork to your book is difficult if your not an artist, but what you don't know is 3D artwork is actually easy to do. For my book, Prophecy, I used iBooks Author which is free on the Mac, and it has a lot of different media types that you can add to your book. I used image pop overs for my character photos, and 3D artwork or Collada (dae) file formats which iBooks Author will take directly. You simply click on the Widgets icon, and select 3D, and drop and postion your 3D frame into your book, then point the file chooser to your Collada file. To create my 3D images I used Cheetah 3D, it's easy to use, available on the Mac, and only costs $99, and it generates perfect Collada files for iBooks Author. Once you've imported your file into iBooks Author it just shows up as a static image. You can choose to have an image back ground on it and also have it auto rotate in the book. To see the actual 3D image rotate, you need to generate a Preview of your book, and then you'll actually see you're 3D artwork rotate, and you can move it around also so your readers can examine your diagram closer. If you double tap the 3D image it will go full screen on a black background, and you hit Done when you want to get back to your book. To make compelling 3D artwork, it's all about textures, a texture is an image back ground for your 3D image, and their actually pretty easy to create. I used Graphic which again is on a Mac to create all of mine. Most of them are fairly simple such as windows on a space station, or doors, or portals, but once their added they bring your 3D object to life. In addition you can download lot's of different textures off of the web. I used a real life plant leaf texture for the Gliese Blue Rose in my book. The leaves on the 3D Gliese Blue Rose are just flat rectangular planes with the leaf texture applied. The only caveat here is the leaf needs to be perfectly symmetrical for it to look good when it is rotated. I also created various Moons and the planet Gliese 581G in my book, these are super simple, you just need to get the appropriate texture from one of NASA's websites, and apply it to a simple sphere or Ball in Cheetah 3D. The texture is applied via a Material object, and this object has the main Diffuse layer which is where the texture is applied. Usually all your planets come with Specular and Bump maps, these are just additional textures to give your planet realistic surface features and their super easy to apply. To apply clouds to my planets, I simply took the surface texture and applied the cloud texture over it as a transparent PNG file using Pixelmator. Any texture that you want to be transparent has to be a PNG layer with the Alpha layer set appropriately for the amount of transparency you want. You can't use JPG images if you want them to be transparent. Once you have the textures for your planet, creating one in Cheetah 3D is literally a two minute exercise. Hope you enjoyed this.
