Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.5

by Roland Hess

Blender Foundations is the definitive resource for getting started with 3D art in Blender, one of the most popular 3D/Animation tools on the market . With the expert insight and experience of Roland Hess, noted Blender expert and author, animators and artists will learn the basics starting with the revised 2.6 interface, modeling tools, sculpting, lighting and materials through rendering, compositing and video editing. Some of the new features covered include the completely re-thought interface, the character animation and keying system, and the smoke simulator.More than just a tutorial guide, Blender Foundations covers the philosophy behind this ingenious software that so many 3D artists are turning to today. Start working today with Blender with the accompanying web site which includes all of the projects and support files alongside videos, step-by-step screenshots of the trickier tutorials, as well as a direct links to official resources like the Blender download site and artist forums.

Genres: Art, Reference, Technology

417 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 15, 2010

About the author

D. Roland Hess works in machine learning at Google, and has written about art and software for Focal Press, John Wiley & Sons, and Taylor & Francis, winning an American Publishers Association PROSE Award in 2011 for his book on character animation. He honed his craft in the Creative Writing program at UPenn, but gave up the potential glory of starving-artistdom for a career in production art and software development.

His hobbies include construction (carpentry, electrical work, sweating copper), weaponry, tending bar, cars that Go, writing software, playing piano and guitar, and occasional forays into art. He lives in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, the glorious Gateway to the Midwest.

Reviews

[Richard Prins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, even though it tries to cover everything that Blender is capable of doing. Too many times that means there is no space (or desire) for going deeper into an aspect, and it is stated as such.

By covering everything it does give you a nuts and bolts approach to making a complete animation (which develops throughout the book) from start to finish, and helps with considering all the (technical, practical, and aesthetic) aspects that go into such a project.

Not for absolute beginners, but suitable for people who have experimented with various Blender components (modeling, texturing, animating, rendering) for a bit and are looking to make a project.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good, basic, general book that trains you in how to use Blender. The early chapters are good for anyone, and well worth going through in detail. The later chapters, however, will be variously useful depending on how you want to use Blender. For example, I have zero plans to animate anything, and only plan on doing still-shot renders. The chapters on Animations, therefore, were ones I skipped. This is a bit frustrating, because there are nuggets in those chapters that are more generally useful... but it is hard to slog through pages and pages on the nuances of Animation when you don't want to animate anything. Likewise, although Hess recommends getting human models from places like DAZ, he assumes we'd want to completely re-rig, pose, and animate them in Blender (rather than in DAZ or Poser). This is certainly not the case for me -- I use Blender to make props and backdrops but DAZ to pose and animate, because DAZ is built for that purpose whereas Blender really is not. So, again, whether the chapters on rigging humans and their clothing are useful will depend on what you plan to do in Blender.

That said, the basic writing style is easy to follow, and the tutorial takes one step by step through most things. The author provides many of the resources from the book on his companion website, so if you aren't sure what to do, you can always download the .blend file and see what he did yourself. The tutorial scene nicely provides the reader with practice in just about every major facet of Blender, so that by the time you are done, you will be able to make basic shapes and scenes and do basic animations. And that's really all you can ask of one book.

[Cinematic Cteve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blender is one of the most popular 3D computer imaging tools on the market. I downloaded the latest version and realized in about an hour that I would need more than the online tutorials to make sense of this powerful software package. My 3D modeling and rendering experience was nonexistent until I started with Blender, mostly out of curiosity than any vocational need.

Blender Foundations delivers the goods -- just enough information for the complete newbie (c'est moi) to roll up his sleeves and design basic CGI. Eventually I will reach the stage where I scan my photographs and build virtual models off of them for video projects. For now, this book is a more than adequate guide for building simple wire frameworks, bringing them to life, adding texture, light and shade, etc. Reasonably priced, too, for what is essentially a software textbook.

One final note unrelated to the quality of information in this book. If you decide to try Blender, be running at least an i7 chip in your machine. The program gobbles a lot of computing power.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for learning this software. It covers a little bit of everything the software can do, a good introduction to it all. Strange that he used an alpha version of the software to write the book around, but things aren't too different in the current beta version.

[Joey · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is one of the best blender books. I wish it had some clear, easy to follow written tutorials instead of being one long, rather disjointed tutorial. as a tutorial it falls into the trap off too many aside discussions. But, it is very comprehensive and expert.