Customer Reviews

Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery: Create photorealistic 3D architectural visualizations of buildings, interiors, and environmental scenery

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery
Compared with a other Blender books in this price range the book performs rather poorly: the images are only BW and it has NO CODE associated with it (though the announcement on Amazon says so)- neither .blend nor .py files and the book's download page offers only a .zip files with a color version of the images for which you have to hand out your E-mail address ....
The level of expertise is for beginners; it gives a short introduction to Blender's interface which is too short for newbies and unnecessary for the more exprienced user.
Then it details the steps to model a simple multi-floor building as well as some "modern" furniture with UV mapping and radiosity. The animation part gives hints for the video sequence editor and logic bricks to produce a walkthrough as well as using the Gimp for postproduction.
The book seems to be written for an older Blender version,as there's still mention of the old UV/Face Select mode, though it could have been updated as the publisher seems to "print it on demand".
As this is the ONLY book about doing architectural modeling in Blender it receives two stars - one for its uniqueness and one for the instructional part.

I would consider buying the book again only at less than HALF the price considering the quality of print and the missing code mentioned already.

The instructions are direct and to the point. Filled with illustrations on almost every page. Topics covered include manipulating the interface, keyboard short cuts, modes, selecting objects, using the 3D cursor, modeling basics, detail modeling of architecture and furniture, materials, textures, UV mapping, basic lighting, Ambient Occlusion, Global Illumination with Yafray, Animation and Post Production using GIMP.

Blender is a neat graphics program that has met with considerable usage, due to its free nature. There have already been several well done books devoted to Blender. Now this current book specialises to using Blender for architectural design. It may well be the first book to do so.

Sadly, it is marred by poor quality screen captures. The diagrams are screen captures of Blender windows. Almost all of these are hard to read. The book suffers in comparison to other Blender texts that have colour images. Here, the images are all grey scale. But even accounting for this, you might well compare this to other, non-Blender books that use grey scale images. Little care has been done to produce legible images. The big problem of course is that Blender is inherently a graphics program. Plus, it's not just about the GUI. The images are meant to be from 3d objects inside a Blender world. It's one thing to have a book on GUI widgets. But when the real emphasis is on actual images, we need good instances.

Pros: As others have noted, this book is a good introduction to using blender and does emphasize architectural modeling. It's well organized, readable, and generally easy to follow. There is an interesting chapter on radiosity, a subject ignored in most other books. Scattered throughout the book are some valuable tips on such topics as best techniques for modeling, level of detail, organization, finding resources on-line and more.

Cons: This book is a little too basic to be of great value to anyone but a total newbie. It provides only a little advanced material and most of that is not provided in useful detail. Unlike every other blender book, this one does not include a CD-ROM nor is there a website for downloadable exercise files. It particularly hit me that the model used to demonstrate radiosity is not available anywhere and the graphics in the book are not presented in such a way that you can easily recreate the model yourself. The chapter on Yafray is totally outdated now. There is nothing at all in this book on creating 3D landscapes.

Other: If you just want to learn the basics of using blender as it relates to simple architectural and interior modeling this might be the right book for you. More advanced users may still be able to pick up a few valuable tips. If you want to get a taste of Brito's style before buying, his website is blender3darchitect.

This book does a great job covering lighting, modeling, and rendering. The tutorials are clear and useful. The book also covers materials and textures, but not quite as detailed as I would have liked.
I could only find one landscape references. It details how to create displacement mapped terrain. This was the only scenery tutorial I noticed.

If you are into scenic landscape recreation this book is not much help. Otherwise, it's worth the time and money.

P.S. It has a pretty good tutorial on Yafray!

I'm still new enough to Blender that the introductory concepts are useful to me. However, the way that these concepts are communicated is poor enough that I often find myself distracted and frustrated by trying to figure out what the author is talking about. Sometimes its a case of the examples not matching up to the surrounding text, as in the description of creating a loop cut (he says something about positioning it just to the left of the door, but the image shows the loop cut halfway down the wall. The following image has the new vertices just left of the door, not where the line for the loop cut had been indicated in the previous image. Little discrepancies like these are very problematic for me when I am trying to learn a new tool.) In addition, there is at least one place where it says there is an example, but no example is given.

Furthermore, it seems that the author is more interested in graphics than in writing. While I believe that it is important for authors to be passionate about their topic, when they are producing a book it is the writing that should be of paramount importance to them. This does not seem to be the case with this book. The level of the writing skill is at best something that I would expect in an online blog or tutorial, but it falls far short of what I expect from a published book. As some examples, it includes sentences like "When the faces are selected, simply press F and a new face will be created. It works the same way as with two vertices, but a new edge will be created instead." and "Now that we know how to work with meshes, let's take a look at how we can transform something simple, such as transforming plane into the walls of a building." Both of these sentences were transcribed verbatim; if it seems like something extra is present, or something is missing, it is that way in the book as well. If those sentences do not bother you, then you will probably be fine with the quality of the writing.

In summary, if you're still relatively new to Blender but have a little familiarity with it, and you don't mind the writing style and errors, this book does contain information that will be useful for getting started with architectural modeling.

It maybe aimed for architectural visualization. But for me it worked as a good introduction to polygonal modeling with Blender. The basic Tools are all there and demonstrated including rendering. I'd say buy this book before buying "Essential Blender". Of note, he's using version what appears to be 2.42 or 2.43, which means for most people now using 2.49, they will have to do a little hunting for some features, and in the case of the bridge function, it's no longer there.

It seems like the guy learned blender just enough to make the scene on the cover, and then wrote a book about only those tools and techniques he learned in the effort. It's incredibly lacking in coverage. I'm glad I read this on safari books online instead of paying money for it. "The Essential Blender" is better in absolutely every way, including the price, even if you are only trying to do architecture, buildings, and scenery.

This is a concise but thorough explanation of how to use Blender
for architectural and interior modeling. It is well written although, there
are some spelling mistakes. Unfortunately all of the images of the user
interface are in gray tones. This does not however, detract from it's
beautifully organized structure. You don't need to be a pro, either, it is
possible to use as an intro to Blender but, it is definitely of salient
value to the professional architect or engineer, as well.

A wonderful book, highly recommended by this reader!

Last Oct. 24 I received a copy of Blender 3D - Architecture, Buildings and Scenery. While snail mail here in Philippines is slower than a snail (is there an animal like that? xD), I'm still pretty excited about this book. And I have finished it reading last week, Saturday.

The book was authored by Allan Brito who specializes on information visualization. Having a background in 3ds Max and began knowing Blender since 2003, since then Allan made huge contributions for Blender, from useful tutorials to books. [...] You can also look at one of his site which is dedicated on architectural visualization with Blender blender3darchitect.com.

After two weeks, from busy in school to going back home and reading this book, I'm really happy that I finally finished reading it. This book was my first Blender book. So I'm kinda oriented on learning by Googling tutorials over the net. After scraping over all the pages, I realized that this was an all in one book. It has everything you need but of course focuses itself on architectural aspects like working with CAD files and detailed modeling for furniture's plus many more.

All in all it has 14 chapters. The first six chapters introduces architectural visualization with Blender, the blender interface and modeling. The modeling part also explains on how to work with CAD files. Then from Chapter 7 upto 9, it teaches how to apply materials, textures and UV Mapping. There's even explanations on Ray Tracing like reflections and shadows. Chapter 10 to 12 intrigue me most because it teaches setting up lights, using radiosity and ambient occlusion, and especially a good tutorial on global illumination with YafRay. The 13th Chapter introduces the normal animating stuff, but it also teaches interactive animation using the Game Engine! The last chapter is guide to using GIMP (a free software graphic application) for post-production.

This book is very good for people in architecture who wants to start using Blender as their 3d application. The book is a complete guide from building 3d models, materials, textures, lights, animation, to post production. In total, this is a good book for beginners who want to delve more on architectural aspects. And also this might be good for some experienced blender users who wants to understand more on detailed modeling, texturing options, radiosity, and global illumination with an external renderer namely YafRay.

I'm one of the people who are expecting for a Part 2 of this book. As this book has a good sense on explaining the important things in architectural visualization.

So go grab one now!