The Essential Blender( Guide to 3D Creation with the Open Source Suite Blender [With CDROM])[ESSENTIAL BLENDER W/CD][Paperback]

by RolandHess

The Essential Blender( Guide to 3D Creation with the Open Source Suite Blender [With CDROM]) <> Paperback <> RolandHess <> NoStarchPress

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Art

Paperback

First published September 25, 2007

Reviews

[Howie · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a lot of Blender tutorials available online, but I have yet to find a source as rounded and well edited as this book. The Blender interface is very hard to pick up on your own; this book made me comfortable enough with it and touched on all the main topics so that now I feel comfortable exploring.

The screenshots are too small but you can tell from the text what is going on. My only wish was that this book was twice as long! There are definitely areas this book does not cover, but as an introduction I found it invaluable.

[Reepacheep · Rating 4 out of 5]

My biggest complaint with this book is that most of the screen shots involving the Blender interface were grey on grey--making it very difficult to see what was happening. If it weren't for captions and descriptions in the adjacent tex, I might have thought this was an artistic sprinkling of grey boxes throughout the book.

Otherwise, I found the book very useful. I flipped through the pages when I first got the book from the library. Then I jumped in to Blender and just started trying things. After gaining some familiarity with the program, I went back to the book and read it through (maybe the first half) until I had to return it to the library.

Between the first and second times I checked the book out I had done quite a bit more with Blender, and different parts of the book became more relevant and interesting to me. I am planning on checking it out again to continue reading, and reviewing the sections I've already gone over.

Assuming updates to Blender don't make this book completely outdated, I would consider this book worth purchasing.

[Askaniblue · Rating 1 out of 5]

The images were grainy and extremely hard to follow at times, but that's not my biggest complaint. First of all the order they have you take in learning the software is bizarre. They were telling me about animation curves before I knew how to model anything. How is that helpful? Still, I could have worked around that by jumping through the book for the sections I needed. No, the worst part was the way the author expounds constantly about how wonderful Blender is and how vastly superior it is to all other programs. I felt like I was being proselytized to. It wasted paragraph after paragraph telling me how amazing the program was when I just wanted to know how to extrude something. I got nowhere with this book and I'm an experienced 3D artist.

The program is very innovative and I want to spend more time with it, but not with this book as a guide. I suggest the "Blender for Dummies" book instead of this hunk of xerox copied propaganda.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Essential Blender by Roland Hess is an excellent book for a Blenderhead that is looking for an overview and introduction to Blender and 3D. lt's chapters are comprised of helpful information and practical hands-on tutorials that enforce the concepts. And if you so desire, it can be read in reverse with the tutorials first, it doesn't really matter. The few issues I have with this book that yield it only four stars are that the images are semi-low resolution and black and white. Also, as of now, the book is somewhat outdated, although a new edition would be best suited for 2.5, which will bring loads of different changes. In the end, how ever you choose to read it, the Essential Blender is er, quite essential to any Blender user's library.

[Seth Kenlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book with all kinds of cool tips and tricks from lots of different experts in the field. Blender never ceases to amaze me.

[Jer]

lent to Rob Baxter