Customer Reviews

Bounce, Tumble, and Splash!: Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I ordered this book without much hesitation, once I discovered Tony was writing it. Having read his past book "Introducing Character Animation with Blender", I ordered this one without thinking twice. Now that this book is in my hands, I can't regret for my choice. The overall quality of the publication is impressive. Not only for the contents but also for the technical production: fine paper with color quality images. It's not common these days. The book is composed of 400 pages (7 chapters) plus an appendix and they are:

Chapter 1 - Re-creating the World: An overview
This chapter describes those tools and techniques that are not well explained elsewhere by the Blender literature. It covers topics like material creation with nodes, transparency, subsurface scattering, sky maps (sphere maps and angular maps) and those tools that can be used to fake physics, when accurate simulations are not necessary at all but you still need a "quick and dirty" method to achieve an effect efficiently and with sufficient speed (an example: water simulation with surface tension displacement or cloth simulation using a displacement modifier). Obviously, these techniques are useful for everyone involved using Blender. No doubt. Much appreciated.

Chapter 2 - The Nitty-Gritty on particles.
The first thing I thought after reading this chapter was:"WOW". *ALL* the latest development on Blender particles is covered here: emitters, reactors, positioning particles on a grid, chained physics systems, various types of visualizations, force fields (harmonic, magnetic, vortex, spherical, wind, etc.)
You will be guided through the creation of a convincing fire material using clouds and stencils textures! All is explained gradually and with great style. Highly informative.

Chapter 3 - Getting flexible with Soft Bodies and Cloth.
As you can expect, all that has been developed is covered here: baking, how to animate a spring, force fields and collision, using curves with softbodies (it will teach you how to animate a chain using an empty), stress maps, how to produce a fantastic cube of gelatin using lattices, simulating clothes. It will even explain how to use the demolition plugin to produce a window breaking in a spiderweb pattern!

Chapter 4 - Hair Essentials: The Long and Short of Strand Particles.
How to produce hair, fur and grass. After covering the basics, this chapter will guide you through the creation of an hairstyle on top of a practice head. One of my preferred chapters.

Chapter 5 - Making a Splash with Fluids.
One of the most interesting part of Blender: the fluid simulator. All is covered here: domains, resolution, inflow, outflow, fluid object intersection, kinematic viscosity, obstacles (considering animation, of course).

Chapter 6 - Bullet Physics and the Blender Game Engine.
One of the less undestood parts of Blender is certainly the game engine. So I was favourably impressed when I have seen an entire chapter dedicated to it. This chapter describes all the tools needed to produce hard bodies simulations, using the game engine and the powerfullness of the Bullet Physics Library. Actors, actuators, IPO curves, rigid body simulations with IPO curves, joints, ragdolls ... This is material that will be probably new to most Blender users.

Chapter 7 - Imitation of Life: Simulating Trees and Plants.
This chapter explores a few tools that can be used for creating trees and vegetation in general, like the L-System, ngPlant and Ivy Generator.

Each chapter is independent, so you don't need to read the book from the first page, with the exception of chapter 4, who strongly depends by the two previous chapters. This book is of course not intended for beginners. This book is completely updated with the latest Blender development and it covers the actual stable release. This is the documentation Blender needs. I highly recommend this book. It is well written, well presented, well structured and, most importantly, it's definitely fun!

This book is well written and beautifully illustrated. That high illustration quality is more important than you might think as in other Blender books the images are so poor it is hard to read the many many settings that are required to work through the tutorials.

I found this book to not be kidding that it isnt aimed at beginners (it seems there is no Blender resource aimed at a thorough understanding of the interface). It would have been nice if they had mentioned that on the front or back cover instead of page 16 in the introduction. It took me thirty minutes to decipher what was meant by "Create your first texture for your ocean surface material and map it using the Empty object". While all the tutorials seem to work, sometimes too little is mentioned about why you are doing certain things. Again, if not a Blender expert expect it to take a long time to get through each example. I suppose you will learn in the event you are successful, but I was sorely tempted to give up in certain cases.

This is a great book. The quality of the print, color illustrations (although they sometimes don't do justice to the original RGB artwork), the bundled DVD with examples and scripts... everything is top-notch.

The text is easy to understand, and illustrations give you a very clear picture of what you need to do, and where. It covers all (and I really mean all) aspects of physics simulation: materials, shaders, hair, soft bodies, cloth, water... everything. It presents everything in a well systematized way, so you can't get lost.

The only thing that bothered my a little, is that author makes references to previous chapters, so if you're jumping around the book, you may find you need to read a few chapters more than you thought you'd need. But that's okay, because anything you read in this book is good learning material.

For an aspiring Blender newbie, this book is, probably, the quickest way of getting up to speed, and even getting the hang of some pretty advanced stuff.

This book does teach you how to do neat things that many Blender users overlook..

However, the explanations (if they exist) are very poorly presented.. The writer does not explain why or when to use a certain technique; it tells you to blindly follow instructions and (hopefully) figure things out on your own.. This is frustrating and demotivating. Why should I follow your instructions when I don't know what you're trying to do?

Overall, as I said, you get to learn a few neat things (the hair chapter is especially well-written), but most of the book is following instructions without getting the big picture.

I must say, I'm biased... I started liking this book the first time I read the title! The book is very impressive, it is full-color, lots of images, and the chapters are nice and modular so you can jump to the section the topic you're interested in. Tony Mullen did a great job in making the complex straightforward. The tasks in the chapters are clearly written in step-by-step style. He gets right to the point of the chapter and has you work through the material. Another nice touch is seeing pics and blurbs on various Blender artists/developers.

I purchased this hoping to learn to use Blender, and open-source program available from blender.org. The book is very well written, very informative, and an excellent reference, but definitely NOT for beginners; the author even says so. If you, like me, are a beginner, either buy this AFTER getting "Character Animation With Blender" or "The Essential Blender," buy it WITH one of those, but if you are serious about learning 3D imaging, animated or not, this is a definitive must for your library.

Very enjoyable, easy reading. This book goes in depth on the physics, and water simulations, as well as how to use the game engine to animate effects that cannot be done otherwise. This book is not cumulative, so you can jump right in to the chapters you want to learn about. Definitely not for the absolute beginner though. Highly recommended.

This book is a serious waste of time. I'm not a beginner and am interested in learning how to create waves. On page 27, step 4, he explains how to create an empty, make a texture, and name it Displacement. Then he says to "Map it to Nor and Disp with the values shown in Figure 1.35." When I couldn't figure out how to do that I opened up the file in the provided CD with the book and realized that his file did not match his instructions in the book. I've bought hundreds of books from Amazon for personal and professional use and this is the first one I'm asking for a refund.

Great book on blender. Has lots of great examples to learn for any level of expertise.

I just bought the book and will start learning it immediately. The book is amazing in its illustrations and quality. I had a complaint about another book by Tony Mullen. He responded to my complain in a matter of hours. I will let more experienced reviewers evaluate the book, but I will highly recommend any author who cares so much for his customers.