The Essential Blender: Guide to 3D Creation with the Open Source Suite Blender |  | Author: Roland Hess
Publisher: No Starch Press
List Price: $44.95
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Rating:  50 reviews
Sales Rank: 19501
Platform: Not Machine Specific
Media: CD-ROM
Pages: 376
Number Of Items: 1
Operating System: Not Machine Specific
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 1.1 x 9
ISBN: 1593271662
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.6930285536
EAN: 9781593271664
ASIN: 1593271662
Publication Date: September 27, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 50
Good instructions, poor illustrations, slightly outdated October 9, 2009
Laren K. Mortensen (Irvine, CA)
This book I would say is worth the money. It gives really good explanations of Blender. I have used Blender a little bit, but still learned a lot from reading it. It had very good explanations especially in the discussion sections.
For each chapter there is a hands on tutorial, and a discussion section. Both were well done except the illustrations were very small and impossible to read. The nice thing was that there is a website for the book: [...]
Many of the poor illustrations have really good replacements. The website won't replace the book because about 75% of the pictures aren't online. However, it does seem that the 25% that are online are there to cover the really bad pictures in the book. With the online resource and the book, I could see almost all the pictures well enough to know what to do.
My biggest complaint is that the book is starting to get outdated. Blender has been changing so quickly that I don't think there was anything that could have solved this however (at least for the printed book). When you get to the later chapters such as particles and UV editing, you will need to Google a lot. It also helps to look at the release notes for the different versions of blender so that you can figure out how Blender was changed when you can't figure out the equivalent command. The interesting thing is that I like all the Blender changes better, but it can really slow you down when you are going through the tutorials.
One source that I also found really helpful to learn blender along with this book is the Blender manual at [...] . The manual really helps you to know detailed explanations for how all the tools work. The problem with the manual is that you don't see how to use the tools. Whereas the book tells you how to do things so you can see the tools in action, but it doesn't give you detailed explanations of the tools. The two go together really well, especially when you are stumped on a tutorial.
Amazingly helpful September 3, 2009
C. Glenn (here, now)
SUGGESTION TO PUBLISHER/AUTHORS: Put full-color, hi-res versions of the illustrations on a web page somewhere, without any text, keyed to the illustration numbers in the book. That would fix the only real problem this book has: monochrome illustrations that are too small. Doing so would not cut into sales of the book, since illustrations without the accompanying text would be fairly useless.
I must say, the blender interface is incredibly complex, but amazingly well thought-out. I've gone through the first two chapters of this book (basic interface and basic animation) in one 3-hour session, and I feel like I know my way around. The interface is incredibly unique. This book provides explanations, memory tricks for learning your way around, and several alternative ways to do the same thing. The examples are just complex enough to not seem contrived or artificial, yet simple enough that you can follow along. And they seem to cover many functions you can imagine actually using for your upcoming projects.
 Have to agree...POOR figure shots August 9, 2009
Robert C. Fuller
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I can discount poor figures in a book - BUT NOT WHEN THE TUTORIAL INSTRUCTIONS HINGE ON THEM!!!
Case in point:
From page 112...
"If you like, you can turn off the view's grid lines...adjusting the panel to match the illustration..."
The illustration in question is LITERALLY the size of a postage stamp, and even using a magnifying glass, you can NOT read the values entered into the panel. Every tutorial in the book is littered with examples like this.
It's obvious the publisher (The Blender Foundation) is new to publishing computer books, so I'll cut them a little slack. The text in the book is lovely -- just FIX the damn screen shots, people!
 For those that can't afford Maya or 3D Studio Max. July 15, 2009
S. G. Paxman (Utah)
Blender is a free Open Source 3D Modeling Program, much like Maya, 3D Studio Max and XSI.
Most of the time when dealing with Free Open Source, they like to say "Think Free as in Freedom, and not Free as in Free beer."
Well this Program is Free Beer my friends. but the book however is not. Well at least not the hardcopy version.
This book is a great resource to have if you can get over the steep learning curve of the Programs interface. which often time make getting started with Blender very difficult. After you get over that initial Hump Learning how to use blender get a whole lot more fun and easier.
There are however websites that have video Tutorials that are quite good. Blender Underground is one of the finer I've seen.
this is not to discredit the book, The book is fine and dandy. but can get a little too bogged down with technical terms at time and a couple of the Tutorials in the book are missing a set or two giving you different results then the ones shown in the Little Colorless and some time hard to see picture.
there is a Link to correction they added to book after publishing it, and there are a few other places you can go for help.
If you are going to get this book, I would highly recommend that you instead buy it directly from the Blender 3D e-Shop [...]
Buying it directly from them will Help them with funding for a lot of great project and development cost they run into from time to time.
As a reference Manual, this is a great tool. as a learning tool it's okay but not the greatest...
 indispensable July 6, 2009
Patchy Kahn (Reno, NV)
Even tho the book was written during the Blender 2.44 era (for the record, at the time of this writing we're up to 2.49a) it remains an invaluable resource.
If you could only yourself allow one reference book as a new, serious, Blender user -- for the money -- you'll never go wrong here.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 50
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