Customer Reviews

Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First off a disclaimer. I contributed a chapter to 'The Essential Blender' which Roland edited, I also contributed the animation script 'The Beast' for which Roland adapted for his book "Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish". I also am writing a book for the upcoming Blender 2.5. So I have 'conflicts' of interest in both directions :)

As always Roland has excellent writing skills with a enjoyable style, and is a great instructor. The graphics are of high quality, and being in full color is greatly appreciated. I love the coverage of the animation system, which has received some major upgrades, and so there is a lot of new stuff to learn. It is clear that a lot of work has gone into this book, and it will make a useful addition to ones Blender book shelf.

Unfortunately there are a few things that really bug me about the book - firstly I feel the title is misleading. This book is not associated with the Blender Foundation nor is it a sequel to 'The Essential Blender', both of which seem somewhat implied by the title. The Blender Foundation contacted the publisher regarding concerns about the title, but since the book had already gone to press, the title could not be changed. Instead a disclaimer about it not being endorsed by Blender Foundation is to be included inside the book. From talking with Roland he didn't have any control over the title choice.

The title is also misleading in that there in no Blender 2.6 in the immediate future. The Blender Foundation has decided to call the next version 2.5. I think this could be quite confusing both in the near future for this coming release. But also for whatever future release is actually called 2.6 which will likely differ in some significant ways from the current release. This title error is reasonable since there was confusion on the naming and at one point it seemed to be agreed on that the upcoming release would be called 2.6.

Roland recently contacted me noting that the title had been mentioned in some threads at [...] , including one I had posted in so he feels that any concerns could/should have been addressed earlier. That is a fair point, on the other hand I feel that it should have been obvious that the title would be considered a questionable choice.

Aside from the title, there is also the issue that the book is based on an Alpha version of Blender 2.5. The interface for some tools has undergone fairly significant changes, ie the screenshots for sculpting, painting, and uv editing toolbars are all significantly changed. The multires modifier interface and possibly others have changed. Tool shortcut keys and preference options have had some changes. Indeed most of the tools and improvements of the sculpt system were not in the alpha version of Blender that this book documents.

The book however is primarily focused on other parts of Blender. So unless your interest is primarily the sculpt and paint system, or your ability to follow a tutorial where the interface does not agree exactly with the tutorial text, this is a quite good all around introduction to Blender.

Based on the content and quality I'd recommend this book, however the title issues, and using of prerelease software for screenshots I think are a disservice to the readers and could lead to some confusion.

I assume that if you're reading this you're new to Blender and are looking for a great Blender book to get you up to speed. This is the book. I hate long-winded book reviews that boil down to a few relevant sentences so I will get straight to it.

There are three good reasons to buy this book.

1. Roland Hess knows Blender inside and out having been both a Blender artist and a software developer for some of its features. You can have tremendous confidence in what he tells you and know that it will save you time and make you a productive Blender user.

2. Hess focuses like a laser beam on the most important features of Blender and there are a lot of them. He doesn't wander into things that are nice, but you may use once in the course of a year. His writing is clear and direct. He gets to the point and offers professional advice that would take you years to learn on your own. He tackles the main pillars of the Blender platform: modeling, texturing, lighting and animation. His chapter on lighting is the most coherent and useful I have ever read. In addition, he has a number of extras on his web site like great videos on texturing and modeling. You can get most of the .blend files from his site as well.

3. This book will take you beyond the basics. Even though this is billed as a beginner book, Hess isn't afraid to build into the more advanced topics. Some of the stuff he covers like texturing aren't covered half as well in so called "advanced" texts. As an experienced Blender user I can highly recommend this book to intermediate and even advanced users. You will pick up some valuable info from the book. The tutorials are not cheesy little "let's make a coffee cup" tutorials. They're first rate and if you work through them you will be learning some important Blender skills and when you're done with the tutorials you will actually have something you can be proud of.

If you are new to Blender, get this book and study it. Do the tutorials if you can. It will be valuable practice. If you're a veteran Blender user and want to get up to speed with the totally new Blender interface and some of the new features, get this book. The proposition is simple: you can spend 6 months hacking away at Blender and just scratch the surface or you can get this book and spend a few weeks studying it and spend the next 6 months building dazzling CG.

I recently got this book as I was trying to learn Blender by myself with the help of videos I found online.

To start with, this book covers the newest version of blender 2.54 beta (as of this moment) which is very different from the past version, user interface that is , this book helped me a lot in that respect.

The book has plenty of pictures to help you get a clearer view or you can also visit : [...]

The book consists of 404 pages.

Pros:
covers all areas from downloading and installing blender to creating models, animation, scenes etc.
Pictures in the book are all in color. :)
The author takes you from creating a single flower to creating a full blown scene step by step.

Cons:
Later on the author assumes you have memorized plenty of shortcuts to do things in blender so if you have a bad memory like me, you will have to go back to remember how to do stuff.
Shortcut commands should be bold to make them easier to search for.

In the end, the book is good, I gave it 4 stars because I think it could have been a bit clearer explaining things. If you are a rookie or completely new to 3D modeling, this book along with Blenders online video tutorials will help you get off to a right start on things.

I managed to create my flower, vase and chair and also a small animation so I feel like I have learned a lot, in just 1 week. So I feel like its been worth the time spent on it.

The first 128 pages are pretty good. There are a few errors, but nothing major. The information is valuable, and helpful. However, past page 128, this book walks you through the creation, and use of a sample character. And I must say, that this is the most un-appealing and downright ugly cartoon character you'll ever see in any book of this sort. The character is so bad, that I am having a very, very difficult time forcing myself to go back to this work. This is a petty, petty criticism on my part, and yet, the reality cannot be denied. I absolutely hate the character. And it, for me, affects the entire work. Dramatically.
I have purchased a different book to complete my study of Blender. That should tell you how much the character ruins this book's presentation. If these types of things don't bother you, then you will clearly like this work more than me.
I apologize to the author - who clearly shares a different sensibility than me concerning character work. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if I'm going to review this work honestly, then I must say that I simply did not enjoy the presentation - to the point that the good information was overshadowed.

Blender's recent facelift with version 2.5 got me interested in creating 3D art (although I was curious about it the previous Blender interface discouraged me from even trying). I quickly realized there were more and more resources on the web putting out tutorials, but I tend to prefer the structured approach of books to get a solid foundation on a subject, so after informing myself I got this book.

The part about informing yourself is important. A lot of people seem to get discouraged by the "2.6" tag on the cover, for example (Blender's most up-to-date version as of today is still 2.57), but it only takes a quick google search to find the author's blog where he explains what that's all about. And in fact you have no need to worry: despite having been published almost a year ago, and even after a whole year of beta releases with accompanying changes to the software, the book was incredibly accurate when the first stable version of Blender 2.5 came out, and most likely will still be for a while. The author is a developer of the software and also (in my opinion) a great teacher, and those two traits made him focus on the core concepts of Blender that are more important to a newcomer and are less likely to change dramatically as the software evolved. The few little changes that have occurred are documented on the support website for the book, so no worries there either.

The book follows a project-driven approach, taking you from the very first vertex (literally) to a complete animation. You will model, light, texture, rig and animate, and also be introduced to other things like sculpting and compositing, in a sequence that makes a lot of sense. The structure isolates the core subjects well and gives you plenty of space to go out on your own to discover new things and bring them into your scene. In fact most chapters end with a "What we missed" section that gives you a few pointers of things you might want to research about. I found this very valuable as it gave me exactly what I wanted when I looked for a book to teach me Blender: show me my way around the basics and I'll do the rest, and if you've got some useful pointers so much the better!

Another couple of important features for me were the focus on what is most important and the artist's point of view - the author tells you what things you should commit to memory and what things you will find yourself doing less often, and will also sometimes step away from the technical side of operating the software to give you tips on how to achieve better artistic results.

Finally, the author himself is very accessible (great humor in the book by the way). I got stuck a couple of times and really couldn't figure out why, so I got in touch with him via the e-mail he provides. Not only did he tell me what I was doing wrong, he also gave me step by step instructions on how to get it right.

Wow, I managed to sound sober so far! Now for a total change of tone: if you're looking for more excitement go ahead and look for my blog, where words like "awesome" and "fantastic" abound. You'll find that I followed the book from start to finish and dedicated at least one blog post to each chapter, documenting my progress and micro-reviewing. So do what I did: inform yourself (hint: google my name with blender next to it!) and you'll find out that this book is totally awesome even before you buy it!

If you want to learn Blender, you should pick up this book. That's the short version.

Hess made a wise decision to structure his entire book around the creation of a single project, one that incorporates basic modeling, lighting, and character animation. Hess has contributed code to Blender itself (from what I understand), so the man knows what he's talking about. His explanations of some of the more technical subjects (casting shadows, say) are particularly lucid. I especially appreciate his honesty when it comes to the Blender's limitations, and also how you can "cheat" to work around them.

I can't give the book a full five stars for two reasons. The first is that the Blender interface changes so rapidly -- and indeed has changed since the publishing of this book -- that beginners less adept at learning new programs may struggle to locate various menu commands. This is a minor issue -- most keyboard shortcuts and menus match up -- but an issue none the less. Honestly this isn't Hess' fault, it's simply an issue when teaching a rapidly changing open source program (hence the title of this review).

Second, there are a few occasions when Hess neglects to mention some common snafoos likely to crop up in some of his lessons. For example, in an early lesson Hess explains how to use the array modifier to create a set of four evenly spaced table legs rotated around the base of a table. He does not mention that if you at any point scale your table legs, the array modifier will not work properly (it will make each leg copy larger than the next). This is because you have to apply any scale or rotation changes BEFORE using the array modifier. This Blender quirk can actually cause all sorts of problems, and I'm surprised he doesn't mention it.

I didn't run into too many issues like the one above, but there are a few, and I would worry they might become roadblocks for novice users, especially as the issue above isn't something a novice would be able to look up for himself, at least not easily, as it's in no way intuitive.

While only playing once and a while with Blender, you quickly might forget the shortcuts and how things are working. This is a great book to keep them remembering, and to make use of them, with great examples. As it is written for the latest Blender version, I was also taken into the new GUI, which is really a step forward, and the book explains quick and nicely how it works. For me is this a must have, next to another few other ones I've regarding Blender.

I've started learning Blender 2.5 directly with this book with little to no background in 3D graphic creation (played around with 2.49 for a few weeks with tutorials found on the internet) and i have to say that this book guided me very well in learning all the necessary stuff like modelling, lighting, coloring and rigging. Even if you're not the top-notch professional 3D artist when finished with this book, it leaves you with all the knowledge needed to go further by yourself alone and with the Blender provided online documentation.

The Book itself is well written, easy to read and follow - sometimes even with a little sense of humor.

A major drawback with this title is, that it's written with pre release software so some things don't work the way they were described in the book, but with a little help from google this isn't a real showstopper and kind of normal for a software which is under permanent development.

Final statement: Worth every buck if you want to dig into 3D graphics with Blender

I needed to find out where the tools I have been using for years disappeared to in the new interface design.
This book does that and more. Excited to have a guide on hair and cloth. Has simple rigging and UV mapping.

The best part is, as a visual learner, the color images that you can see details in! Some blender books I have bought were printed on newsprint (I swear!)and you just could not make out what the picture were of. Let alone the differences in render settings.

I am thrilled.

I gave this book 5 stars because it contains exactly what I was looking for in a book. I had never used Blender and I wanted a book that showed how to use the software. If you pick up this book expecting to learn character animation or building a movie, you may be disappointed. Those topics are important but they require you to understand the software first. In other words, you need to learn the basics of the software before you can hope to learn the more advanced techniques of computer animation. You need the basics. And this book provides it. You will learn Blender and understand the software. From there you can move on to other books that teach the more advanced topics. Should all of that be in one book? I don't think so. I don't want a 2000 page book. I want each book to cover their specialty and in my opinion, this book does that, with the specialty being learning Blender the software, not learning any particular technique.

So what is covered? Everything you need to create an animation, but just their basic introductory information. The book states v2.6 of Blender (be careful if you use Linux and rely on the package manager, it might not have that version yet). Some screenshots are from the 2.5 Alpha (2.5 being the development version that becomes 2.6), but for the most part, they match.

You learn the Blender interface then move on to modeling, creating objects and characters. Then move to surfacing and rendering and putting it all together. Can you create a movie with your own characters and objects after this? Doubtful (unless you are really good at understanding the complexities of the software). But you learn how you would do this in Blender. So then you can move on to the more advanced books (I have looked at a few and if you don't already know Blender - they are very difficult to follow).

As for the writing, well done. The author takes what could be a dry subject (learing software) and makes it interesting and enjoyable.

Buy this book first and then move on.