World Famous Comics: The Essential Blender: Guide to 3D Creation with the Open Source Suite Blender
The Essential Blender: Guide to 3D Creation with the Open Source Suite Blender
By: Roland Hess Publisher: No Starch Press Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: No Starch Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 376 Platform: Not Machine Specific Publication Date: September 27, 2007
Product Description: Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that is a real alternative to commercially available 3D design software. A cross-platform software package with millions of downloads annually, Blender is now one of the world's most popular 3D design tools. Although Blender is free, it's intended for design professionals and others motivated to become 3D artists. The Essential Blender will provide you with the knowledge you need to help integrate Blender into your work and begin to master its powerful creation tools. If you've never tried 3D design before, an introductory chapter will familiarize you with relevant terminology and concepts. If you're already experienced with commercial 3D software, The Essential Blender will get you up to speed with Blender quickly. After a tour of Blender's 3D modeling, animation, and rendering capabilities, you'll learn how best to use Blender for these tasks:
Object manipulation and animation
Mesh and sculpt modeling and shape animation
Materials and texturing (including UV unwrapping)
Lighting and rendering
Particle animation
Character rigging and animation
Node-based composition The book is modular in its approach, with each topic addressed independently and accompanied by hands-on tutorial sections. The combined expertise of key members of the Blender community, coupled with the experience of editor Roland Hess, bring you The Essential Blender--the definitive guide to Blender. You'll find a wealth of 3D design information inside that will help you to unlock your artistic potential and get the most out of Blender. Includes a complete version of Blender 2.44 on the CD-ROM. Covers Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (x86 and PowerPC), Solaris, FreeBSD, and IRIX. Produced by The Blender Foundation. Printed and distributed By No Starch Press.
Waste of time for experianced 3D users I don't know if this book is good for n00bs, but for me it was a train wreck. Maybe if less of the book was them telling me how much superior Blender was and more was telling me where tools were and how to use them, it would be more effective. I was just trying to figure out why objects were sticking to my mouse and it was expounding on it's awesome interface? Not only that, but I found the order of their chapters to be confusing. Why tell me about animation curves before I have the slightest clue how to model? Also, it's so heavy in text, it took me forever to trek through it.
If any professionals are looking at this book, I suggest you avoid it and save yourself the effort of wading through the hip deep fan-fare text. The Dummies book is more what you're looking for.
Fabulous book. A must have! - If you're a beginning Blender user then this is the book for you. - Whether you've used 3d applications before or not this is the book for you.
Seriously, this book runs step by step through some of the most challenging aspects of Blender and makes them 2nd nature. Certainly the illustrations can be challenging to see but the written descriptions are so well written that the illustrations need not be crystal clear. The illustrations are simply a way to double check what the written directions have already told you.
In short, Blender has one of the steepest learning curves of any program I've yet encountered but this book reduces that steepness to that of a bunny slope on ski hill. If you want to learn Blender quickly and easily then you MUST have this book. Get the picture?
Blender has a huge huge advantage with this book over many other softwares with badly written manuals, and there are many. "The Essential Blender" is really the best place to start. The instructions are intense, but very clear, and you can actually follow along and do the exercises, if you go step-by-step. I say it's intense because this is a technical subject, and it can't be avoided. But what a blessing that no steps are left out, and it's all clearly explained. You don't need much hand-holding if you use this book.
Not perfect, but good enough I've used Blender a fair amount, so I expected "The Essential Blender" to be something of a review with hopefully a few valuable nuggets thrown in -- and so it proved.
This is not a complete course on Blender. Blender is a powerful 3d suite, and is far too large for 370+ pages -- the Mesh Modeling chapter could have easily been expanded to an entire book -- but this book will give you a good, valuable intro to a decent range of subject matter. The book uses version 2.44 (as of this review, it's up to 2.48.a), which makes parts of certain sections a tad obsolete. The Rigging and Skinning chapter, for instance, doesn't mention Bone Heat, a newer, invaluable skinning procedure that can save hours of frustration. Still, the methods described in all chapters are used on occasion and it's a very good idea to plow through the exercises. The author strikes a good balance of explaining enough of the Blender basics and the CG concepts without going into such detail that would make the book too long and costly.
Some of the pictures need a magnifying glass -- really. It's not a terrible handicap, but I can imagine a newbie's justifiable irritation in the Materials chapter, as he strains to read numbers just a hair too small to make out. The book, with corrections, is on-line at: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Books/Essential_Blender, but I noticed that the on-line version is missing some of the pictures in the book, and some of the details in the pictures there are tiny, too. The example files on the CD Rom are meant to be starting points for the exercises, and that's fine, but it would have been nice to have a completed .blend file for each chapter.
Overall, this is a fine book. If you're new to Blender, this book can save you all kinds of time and aggravation, and if you're an intermediate, there are enough valuable tips and sections on insufficiently taught material, such as the section on compositing, that also makes it worthwhile.
Clear, meaty, lots to digest A really good, clear intro to what had always been an intimidating topic in the past. Of course, it really helped to be able to read a good bit of the book online via the Blender wiki, but the book is really nice to have, too.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
