Blender Production: Creating Short Animations from Start to Finish

by Roland Hess

Short animation projects are ambitious and time-consuming, but with a good plan and toolset, they can be hugely rewarding. Blender expert Roland Hess will get you up to speed on animated short fundamentals, including writing, storyboarding, blocking, and character creation. This follow-up of Blender Foundations will introduce the more advanced functionalities of Blender, such as the Library and Linking system, physics simulators, the integrated compositor, and the Sequence Editor. If that wasn’t enough, this tutorial-based book will also have you create a short animation from scratch, making you a master of the Blender toolkit in no time. * Learn how to fully manage your art assets using the Library and Linking system *Gain practical advice on story construction tailored specifically for short animations *Companion website includes the full Blender software kit, sample project files amounting to 100+ MB of valuable content, including models, textures, materials, scenes and animations ***PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING DIFFICULTIES WITH THE COMPANION SITE URL. PLEASE VISIT TO ACCESS ALL OF THE COMPANION MATERIALS!***

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2008

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

[Reepacheep · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm in the "flipping through to see what's here" stage with this book. Next comes the more thorough reading. I'll probably not finish before I need to send this back to the library, but that's not unusual for me.

My initial perusal leaves the impression that this book has a wealth of information that is practical and thoughtfully laid out. I am looking forward to reading this and putting what I learn into practice.