F.P.O. Books for backgrounds and mockups (.blend in thread)

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FPOBooks_Stack
FPOBooks_Stack1080×1080 1.03 MB

It all started with needing a book for scale on Camp Lamp…

Being a former (very former) print designer, and a bit of a dork, I made “The Lipsum”, referring to the “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…” Latin-in-a-blender text that’s used as filler text for a design in progress. The author was F.P. Onleigh, a reference to “F.P.O.” or “For Position Only”, which is what you slap or scribble across a low-resolution photo you haven’t actually bought, so the people looking at the comp you’re working up know it’s not meant to look like that in the final, or they don’t get disappointed when you can’t license the first image you pulled off Google to demonstrate the general idea, that it’s just For Position Only.

And, of course, I had to go writing “Award-Winning Author of BULKING DUMMY and COMP” across the bottom… which meant that now I would be left an incomplete shell of a man until I made “COMP” and “BULKING DUMMY” as well-- even though I only actually needed the front of one book.

Next came “COMP”, modeled after one of those printed-by-the-millions authors’ books with everything sold by huge embossed type. “Comp”, referring to “Comprehensive Layout” (I have to look that up every time. I’ve only ever called them “comps”.), a speculative layout of a piece that shows where things go, though the things themselves might be low-resolution FPO fill-ins.

Then was “Bulking Dummy”. A bulking dummy is a book mockup that’s used to show the actual size and profile of a book, and sometimes is printed with a cover to use to show clients or to serve as a model for photography. It’s made the same size and materials as the real thing, but the pages (sometimes the cover) are all blank.

I’d made an “I FUCKING LOVE MY LIBRARY!” bookmark-- because I’ve got all the class and sophistication of a 13-year-old-- and the Greasemartin Community Library sticker-- don’t ask me where I got “Greasemartin” from-- I think I’d seen something recently about martins, the bird, and “Greasemartin” sounded like the sort of town name that was suitably plausible from some distance until you stopped to think about it.

And, of course, I can’t leave cover-facing-up books well enough alone, so there’re cover blurbs and perplexed pull quotes on the back, as well. The geometry is dead simple-- I wasn’t going for gritty realism, here. It’s largely a brick with a bowed in side, though there’s a bit of a trick up the sleeve with the pages. There are two layers, about half a mm apart. The outermost has transparent stripes from a stretched noise texture, and the inner one is just an opaque book texture. With this, you get the slightly-misaligned pages look, and even a bit of fuzz along the edge.

FPOBooks_Scatter
FPOBooks_Scatter1920×1080 1.87 MB

Since I’d hate to see all this needless graphic design go to waste, I’ve packaged it up into an asset pack. Make your designer friends chuckle and the rest of them not quite get the joke, with the F.P. Onleigh mass-market paperback set.

The books are just a smidge off size-accurate-- I like to work in metric and I like round numbers, so they’re 170x110mm instead of 171x108mm, at a “1 unit = 1 meter” scale. They’re made with Cycles in mind first and foremost, though they look all right in Eevee. The “Comp” embossing was giving me a bit of trouble in Eevee, so you might want to take that one with a bit more care if you’re using Eevee.

There’s a Readme inside it with more information and a proper license, as well as a script to add asset catalogs automatically, because Blender doesn’t do that automatically. If you open it up with “Load UI” checked, it should all be out in front of you.

FPO Books - Release 1 (Nov 2023) Compressed.blend (1.7 MB)
(ed: Re-uploaded with a bit of copyediting on the documentation)

Colophon:

All models and materials (except images) were made by me in Blender-- 3.4 to start, then 4.0, then I realized that was going to be a compatibility nightmare for assets, so I had to import back through 3.6 and 3.4 to reconstruct it and finish it off in 3.4.

Imagery was made by me in Adobe Illustrator, except the stock images noted below.

Stock Images

Fonts

  • The Lipsum: Friz Quadrata
  • Comp: Bodoni BT
  • Bulking Dummy: Zurich, Bodoni BT
  • Publisher imprints and other ancillary parts: Swiss 721 (Bitstream’s Helvetica knockoff)
  • Bookmark: Souvenir
  • “FICTION / Onl” library sticker: Lekton Bold (with a bit of extra weight faked on with a same-color border) - https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lekton
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