Customer Reviews

Introducing Character Animation with Blender

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The blender community has accomplished some amazing milestones in the past few years, creating an open source 3d production environment that rivals the best (and most expensive) proprietary systems in terms of power, performance, and flexibility. It is truly amazing that one can download for free software that's been used to create artistic and commercial works that have been seen at film festivals and mainstream television worldwide. Sooner or later, one who is interested must ask: what shall I do with all this power? This book helps answer the question, at least when it comes to character animation.

I have been to Blender workshops around the world, and I have seen amazingly talented artists demonstrate methods they've developed over the years to create all sorts of characters, from humans to monsters, from animals to dragons. Watching these creatives who are half my age do more in 30 minutes than I ever thought I could do in a lifetime has been a humbling experience. When I learned that some of these folks would be sharing their knowledge in the form of this book, I pre-ordered it right away.

I have now had the book for a week, and I am *thrilled* that it has turned out as well as it has. The examples are well organized, the methods are completely explained, and the book ships with a DVD that contains everything, and I mean *everything* you need to follow along and/or check your work. The quality and quantity of information is perfectly balanced with the pace of instruction, and I cannot wait to continue reading it in more detail, practicing the methods, and bringing new characters to life.

Well done!

Blender is a free open source 3d application that includes a complete compositing and non-linear video editing system, with a ton of user-created extensions, plugins, scripts, tutorials and guides. However it can be intimidating to people starting out and let's face it, you have to be pretty motivated to teach yourself anything (downloading and collecting all the files you need to start, finding a good tutorial to get started, peering back and forth between two screens if you're lucky to look between the web page and blender as you slowly pick it up after a few weeks. it's annoying there are so few print resources for this amazing tool that collect everything in one place. combing blender with a program like aftereffects and photoshop and you are a one-man production studio. you don't even need that great a computer.

so anyway, this is a complete class in a book. The price is ridiculous, at a minimum because it includes many files and programs that although are free, most people either haven't heard about or are too lazy to find all together. it is excellently written, with great diagrams and a long section of glossy color renders, and really "gets it" in terms of focusing on the aspects of blender you will need to know for character rendering and modeling in general. THIS BOOK WILL TEACH YOU 3D ANIMATION FROM THE GROUND UP. while never insulting your intelligence. incredible value for what it is and even advanced users can get a lot out of it. highly recommended

An earlier reviewer thinks the book is useless without the included DVD.

Not so.

While it's very nice of Tony to include Blender, the Gimp, Audacity, VirtualDub, InkScape, Python, YafRay, BlenderPeople and VLC on the DVD, these are also freely downloadable from the web. [...]

Tony also provides animations and examples from the blender community, including the open source film Elephant's Dream, which are wonderful and inspirational, but not really required to learn character animation by reading the book and doing the projects in the book.

Other files on the DVD are blend files for the projects in the book, projects that Tony walks you through. Projects that, if you really want to get the most out of the book, you'll work through yourself, not simply read about them and then get the finished blend file off the DVD.

It is a great book, and not at all useless without the disk.

I'm brand new to Blender so this is a noob review.If you are new to Blender get this book.If you are interested in in-organic modeling like buildings and such you won't learn about it here but you will learn about the interface and tools.This book is very well written.Now, will somebody please write a short book on modeling buildings,basic architecture and the like? Trying to figure out how to do something simple like doors,windows,wall thickness is a real pain with Blender.
Anyway,this book is exactly what the title say's so it's a must have. So when is that book on architecture coming out?

For those considering a high end 3D modeling and animation software package Blender has to be considered a finalist among the candidates. First there are several technical aspects such as cross-platform portability, a good graphical user interface, is very fast, and more. Then the cost - FREE vs. hundreds to thousands of dollars. That's because Blender is open source with the advantages that there is a huge community of developers and a vast support structure. Bugs are fixed and support is given fast.

This book concentrates on teaching Blender beginning with the basic interface and quickly getting into animation. As this is one of the few Blender books, you can start here, but it goes over the basics pretty quickly.

The CD that comes with the book includes Blender 2.42 (2.43 is current you can get it from blender(dot)org) and a bunch of other open source software that will help with your graphics programming. Finally there are a lot of online resourses that are recommended.

Animation is not easy, but here's a good start.

This is not just a good Blender book, this book is the best Ive seen for learning the whole process of modeling and animating a 3D character. If you are new to 3D, you should know that Blender has a very difficult interface in which to learn, although all the rabid Blender devotees will tell you once you learn it, its the best workflow (I still dont know Blender well enough to make a fair call). But not only does this book effortlessly explain how to use the interface, it teaches very good modeling practices by using a simple but good quality character in which is used for entire book (the body was very easy, the face sort of tricky). This is so much better than regular 3D books that jump around to a thousand different unrelated aspects to the interface. You also are given a brief but good coverage of materials and texturing. And then go on to make quite a complex rig as well as many other aspects of rigging and skinning such as action constraints and facial animation with lip syncing. The book also covers nonlinear animation, lattice deformation and metaballs as well as python scripting. And of course how to render the final animation. Ive found no other 3D modeling/animation book that covers all this so simply. And I was even able to send my .blend file to the email the author provided in the book when I got stuck on rigging and he gladly gave advice.

Introducing Character Animation With Blender is, over all, a good foundation for those who wish to begin working with the modeling and animating aspects of the world's best free 3D production suite, Blender. The reader can follow along in modeling and animating several 3D models, thereby becoming familiar with the software.

However, the book does fall short in several areas:

1. Time-sensitive material. The book was written for Blender 2.42, and software improvements since then have changed certain aspects of modeling (such as the particle system for hair). At the time of this review, Tony Mullen is coming out with an updated book for Blender 2.5 which may correct this issue.

2. The book is illustrated in black and white. This makes it difficult in places for the reader to follow along with modeling or rigging.

3. Tony Mullen spends a lot of time showing "how to" do things, without spending much time explaining "why."

4. Most steps are explained with detailed print and illustrations. However, there are also numerous parts of the book where the reader is given instructions to perform tasks based only on a series of black and white illustrations. The overall feel is that certain segments of the book were put together in a rush.

If you're looking for a book that is software specific and explains how to perform software specific tasks, this book is a good place to begin. However, if you're looking for a software specific book to explain how and why things work a certain way in Blender, this book falls short.

I am very pleased with this long-overdue guide to character animation with my favourite tool, Blender. The trickiest technical aspects of animating with Blender have never been documented and illustrated as well as they are here. Covers all the most recent boosts to functionality including the Modifier system and Sculpting tool.

This covers more than just character animation. It's really an incredible book. The techniques taught make it the most valuable book in my 3D modeling & animation library. I was pleased.

I just received Introducing Character Animation with Blender. The book seems very well written and well illustrated. I have only made it through part of the first chapter, but if I don't learn character animation, it will be my fault, not the book's. Two amazing things: 1. The book had no CD. Nothing. 2. I fired off an email to Tony Mullen complaining about this fact. Within hours, I got a response, and an attachment containing the files I needed. You should definitely buy a book from an author who cares that much for his customers.