3D Books

Nice size book designed like a box that opens w/a pull out drawer. The drawer contains a 16-page booklet and a package of thick puzzle-type numbered dinosaur pieces. The (8 1/2 by 11") booklet primarly consists of pages that have an illustration of a dinosaur, name, 1 paragraph description, & short factual section (like name meaning, pronounciation, period, weight, etc.). There are 11 different dinosaurs. I was impressed with the packaging, thought the booklet contained good illustrations and information, but a little disappointed with the # of pages in the booklet. My 10-year-old son loves dinosaurs and the book is great for comparing quick dinosaur facts. Did you know the Velociraptor was really small compared to the huge dinosaurs of it's time?

Here's one of the most purely FUN supplements ever made for D&D. In this box, you get 24 sheets of cut-out, high-quality, three-dimensional dungeon walls and accessories - plus, three two-sided map posters to play them on! Throw in some cardboard or lead figures, and you can instantly customize any dungeon setup on your tabletop. Once you see how much fun and combat precision you gain with 3D gaming, you'll never want to go back! This giant set will never fit in the box again... be sure you have a decent-sized treasure chest if you open this one up.

How close are we to practical systems for effective 3d visualisation? Blundell provides both a good historical survey of earlier attempts, and a synopsis of current work. The earlier methods do seem primitive.

Naturally, the bulk of the text focuses on what is currently attempted. A wide range of hardware ideas. Like a swept volume. Akin perhaps to rasterising on a traditional TV screen. But now the intent is to generate voxels instead of pixels. There are drawbacks, like a visual dead zone.

Another method uses a static volume. Where light emitters are embedded in this volume. And excited to generate a "true" 3d image. One problem is the sheer mass of computational support, if one wants a 3d time varying display. This bandwidth bedevils most implementations. And static volumes also come with dead zones.

Yet another approach uses a planar screen with fixed beams. But this gives rise to various distortions.

Overall, a good description of how things stand. The technology still needs improvement.

I thought this book was excellent. I found it readable and interesting with lots of real-life examples about how to handle your boss, co-workers, effectiveness, delegation, planning and lots more. Great for a new grad. but also has lots of great ideas for a seasoned business person.

This book will interest the child who is able to see the embedded images and frustrate those who can't. The "hidden" images can be difficult to see and require the viewer to look at it in just the right way. All of the images are from the movie "Casper" and there are pages at the end that demonstrate the embedded images. I spent a great deal of time looking at the images and was able to see the 3-D effects, although I didn't always see exactly what the image was intended to be. Other people may have better luck as I have traditionally had difficulty seeing the 3-D image embedded in this type of picture.

This is the story of Lilly (an 11 year old girl) and four ugly, loud cats...Lily lives in a single parent household and is home alone often because her mother works many jobs to support them. One unfortunate day, Lily is locked out and all the neighbors who usually help her when this happens are not at home...just old, mean Mr. Freeman and his loud, ugly cats. Mr. Freeman hears her crying and admonishes her to stop making so much racket because she's bothering him...eventually he allows her in his house to wait until her mother comes home, where she discovers that despite his cantankerous nature, he's quite loving and caring when it comes to his four very ugly, very loud cats. It's this kindness that Lily remembers when Mr. Freeman dies a short while later and the apartment manager threatens to call the S.P.C.A to get rid of the cats so he can rent the apartment.

Lily feels responsible and begs the manager to allow her to find homes for them first...she's given three days to place the animals...this is a heartwarming story of making human connections with people who you might not normally get to know and how wonderful community and good neighbors can be...that and the story of Lily triumphing over the difficulty of placing the cats before her time runs out! Well thought out and very easy to read for those starting out with chapter books, it also has some simple illustrations to help bring the story to life for those making the transition to all word chapter books. The Four Ugly Cats in Apartment 3D is easy to follow, but interesting for young readers! I'd recommend it for readers just starting to read chapter books on their own without help, it's simple enough for reading the words and still managing to keep the story straight, while still being interesting to the reader! I give it a solid B!

I really loved this book when it came out, and wish the authors would get together to update both the material in the book and the software that came with it to run on 'modern' computing equipment, (this was written when DOS was still king!) The book provided a really good, hands-on approach to fractal theory. It is a little light on application, but wasn't meant to have any of that, so I can forgive and forget. Moving down through to the borders of a Mandlebrot or Julia set in 16bit colour was amazing, and I would love to see what it would look like in the 16 million + colours available on computers today!

Pedagogically, Mortenson's presentation is easy for a reader to follow. Accompanied by generous numbers of diagrams. He gives understandable interpretations of how matrices are used to represent different types of transformations. The underlying geometrical rationale is clear.

En route, the reader is gently introduced to group theory. For finite groups. A way to bind geometry and symmetry. Interestingly, the notation he uses for the symmetries and groups is Schonflies. In 1982, this was already being phased out by crystallographers, in favour of International notation. But maybe mathematicians prefer the older style.

There is also a quick discussion of tensors. Giving rise to contra and covariant vectors. And the metric tensor is introduced as a key idea. All this is a jumping off point for physicists studying General Relativity, though it is not actually mentioned by name.

I enjoyed using this book to teach my 3rd grader about thedifferent systems and functions of the human body. I especially likedthe moveable features of the display models, they worked remarkably well and gave better understanding to the lessons. The text, although a most of it is in very small print, is more than adequate for teaching. I even learned a LOT! A nice resource!

This book can be dense and hard to get into at times. It assumes you know the basics of 3D Studio. Not recommended for the user wanting to learn the basics of animation