World Famous Comics: Bounce, Tumble, and Splash!: Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D
Bounce, Tumble, and Splash!: Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D
By: Tony Mullen Publisher: Sybex Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Sybex Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 400 Publication Date: June 30, 2008
Product Description: Learn all about Blender, the premier open-source 3D software, in Bounce, Tumble, and Splash!:Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D. You will find step-by-step instructions for using Blender’s complex features and full-color visual examples with detailed descriptions of the processes. If you’re an advanced Blender user, you will appreciate the sophisticated coverage of Blender’s fluid simulation system, a review Blender’s latest features, and a guide to the Bullet physics engine, which handles a variety of physics simulations such as rigid body dynamics and rag doll physics.
The one-stop guide to all of the Blender's physical reality This is a great book. The quality of the print, color illustrations (although they sometimes don't do justice to the original RGB artwork), the bundled DVD with examples and scripts... everything is top-notch.
The text is easy to understand, and illustrations give you a very clear picture of what you need to do, and where. It covers all (and I really mean all) aspects of physics simulation: materials, shaders, hair, soft bodies, cloth, water... everything. It presents everything in a well systematized way, so you can't get lost.
The only thing that bothered my a little, is that author makes references to previous chapters, so if you're jumping around the book, you may find you need to read a few chapters more than you thought you'd need. But that's okay, because anything you read in this book is good learning material.
For an aspiring Blender newbie, this book is, probably, the quickest way of getting up to speed, and even getting the hang of some pretty advanced stuff.
Excellent for intermediate and advanced Blender users This is an excellent book for intermediate and advanced Blender users who want to use particles, soft bodies, cloth, hair, fluids, the game engine, and other things that help to simulate physics and real life.
Very Disapointing I have been using blender for a while now and enjoyed his other book about character animation, but I was unable to get any of the 5 tutorials that I tried in this book to work at all. Must be for Advance users only I guess.
Fantastic Book Fantastic Author I just bought the book and will start learning it immediately. The book is amazing in its illustrations and quality. I had a complaint about another book by Tony Mullen. He responded to my complain in a matter of hours. I will let more experienced reviewers evaluate the book, but I will highly recommend any author who cares so much for his customers.
You need this book. Definitely. I ordered this book without much hesitation, once I discovered Tony was writing it. Having read his past book "Introducing Character Animation with Blender", I ordered this one without thinking twice. Now that this book is in my hands, I can't regret for my choice. The overall quality of the publication is impressive. Not only for the contents but also for the technical production: fine paper with color quality images. It's not common these days. The book is composed of 400 pages (7 chapters) plus an appendix and they are:
Chapter 1 - Re-creating the World: An overview This chapter describes those tools and techniques that are not well explained elsewhere by the Blender literature. It covers topics like material creation with nodes, transparency, subsurface scattering, sky maps (sphere maps and angular maps) and those tools that can be used to fake physics, when accurate simulations are not necessary at all but you still need a "quick and dirty" method to achieve an effect efficiently and with sufficient speed (an example: water simulation with surface tension displacement or cloth simulation using a displacement modifier). Obviously, these techniques are useful for everyone involved using Blender. No doubt. Much appreciated.
Chapter 2 - The Nitty-Gritty on particles. The first thing I thought after reading this chapter was:"WOW". *ALL* the latest development on Blender particles is covered here: emitters, reactors, positioning particles on a grid, chained physics systems, various types of visualizations, force fields (harmonic, magnetic, vortex, spherical, wind, etc.) You will be guided through the creation of a convincing fire material using clouds and stencils textures! All is explained gradually and with great style. Highly informative.
Chapter 3 - Getting flexible with Soft Bodies and Cloth. As you can expect, all that has been developed is covered here: baking, how to animate a spring, force fields and collision, using curves with softbodies (it will teach you how to animate a chain using an empty), stress maps, how to produce a fantastic cube of gelatin using lattices, simulating clothes. It will even explain how to use the demolition plugin to produce a window breaking in a spiderweb pattern!
Chapter 4 - Hair Essentials: The Long and Short of Strand Particles. How to produce hair, fur and grass. After covering the basics, this chapter will guide you through the creation of an hairstyle on top of a practice head. One of my preferred chapters.
Chapter 5 - Making a Splash with Fluids. One of the most interesting part of Blender: the fluid simulator. All is covered here: domains, resolution, inflow, outflow, fluid object intersection, kinematic viscosity, obstacles (considering animation, of course).
Chapter 6 - Bullet Physics and the Blender Game Engine. One of the less undestood parts of Blender is certainly the game engine. So I was favourably impressed when I have seen an entire chapter dedicated to it. This chapter describes all the tools needed to produce hard bodies simulations, using the game engine and the powerfullness of the Bullet Physics Library. Actors, actuators, IPO curves, rigid body simulations with IPO curves, joints, ragdolls ... This is material that will be probably new to most Blender users.
Chapter 7 - Imitation of Life: Simulating Trees and Plants. This chapter explores a few tools that can be used for creating trees and vegetation in general, like the L-System, ngPlant and Ivy Generator.
Each chapter is independent, so you don't need to read the book from the first page, with the exception of chapter 4, who strongly depends by the two previous chapters. This book is of course not intended for beginners. This book is completely updated with the latest Blender development and it covers the actual stable release. This is the documentation Blender needs. I highly recommend this book. It is well written, well presented, well structured and, most importantly, it's definitely fun!
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