Customer Reviews

The Official Blender 2.0 Guide w/CD (Miscellaneous)

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

 

 

I speak as a complete newbie to creating 3d art & animation. However, I have been programming and using computers since the teletype and paper strip days. Blender is a fantastic bit of code. That said, the potential Blender god needs to be aware that you will work, sometimes very hard, to understand and master it. It is no different than any other killer app. You will reap what you sow. Is the Blender Manual perfect? No. Is it helpful? Very. Will it answer your every question? Not a chance. Any book that could cover every aspect of Blender would be thousands of pages. What the book will do is get you started, give you a big peek at some of the things you can do with this great software. It will get you started experimenting. Learning Blender from a book is impossible. Learning Blender with this book beside your keyboard can be exciting. Pros: Shows you how to do some really cool stuff, and the demos on the CD are great. Helps decypher the somewhat cryptic interface. Cons: Really weird layout, the chapters seem to be tossed around in random order, and there can be some pretty big gaps in the how-to's

P.S. For those out there whining about the price of the book, it's one of the cheaper user manuals you will find. Go drop $1500 on Adobe or $5000 on 3dMax. Then you'll whine.

If you are new to 3d, or you want to support the open source movement, or you are a starving student who can't afford the large 3d apps, here is your solution. This application is awsome(and free). Blender is a Freeware 3d application, and there is a huge user community that uses it. You can also use blender to make "3D GAMES". Thats right, blender itself can make 3d games(yup, like those quake like games), and you don't have to be a hardcore programmer to be able to tackle it.

Now, if you want to learn blender, this guide is a definate asset. I went to the store, and I thought, "na, this isn't that great", so I put it down. I assumed it was more for beginners. Then I started to use blender again(after a year of not using it), and man...I was looking for questions all over the internet. So I went back, and bought it, i'ts worth every penny!

Trust me folks, this book saves major time. And the tutorials are written quite well, except some terminology is not for the new-to-3d-user.

If you don't have time to learn Blender the hard way (and you'll need alot of time to learn it without instruction) this book is essential. Face it, for the beginner, learning blender without some kind of guidance is a strange kind of torture. You feel stupid and frustrated and cannot shake the feeling that everything isn't working properly. This book provides the operational foundation, interface concepts and design methodolgy needed to begin to educate yourself. This book won't show you everything, nor turn you into an ace Blender dude, but it will provide the understanding necessary so that you can effectively play and teach yourself.

One word of caution concerning Blender, it is an awesome package, but it is finicky about video cards. It can get quirky and flake out on many popular cards. The recommended card is any nVidia card especially any of the GeForce line. Forewarned is forearmed!

The only real advantage to this book is that it can be found cheap. You can solve the binding problem by having Kinko's or somebody put a spiral binding on it after you pull it apart. The projects are almost always lacking in complete instructions and more often then not will ask you to do something that hasn't been explained yet. Real time projects are not in the book at all. Time spent with it is not a complete waste as long as you realize that you will not be able to complete the projects as presented.

Although the color printing was impressive and helped me visualize the outcomes of the exercises the instructions often left out a step or two. In addition the short hand notation that is used to refer to short cuts in Blenders was often confusing. That said the book did help me learn the basics with the incredibly cryptic Blender interface.

For everybody knowing the first Blender guide this manual will be a delightful surprise. It has the paper and print quality of a luxury car advertisement and is quite encyclopedic, expect for the game engine and python part of Blender. For the game engine, they say, a second book will be written, soon. If someone (e.g. an earlier reviewer) finds this book not perfect enough for a newcomer, then one may remember how much fun it was to learn Blender with no tutorial whatsoever, when Blender was first made publicly available. This book together with "The Blender Book" (also from Amazon.com) definitely enable one to create impressive 3D graphics. This one is more pleasing to the eye while the other looks more like a textbook. But as the authors say, much more information is available on www.blender.nl, where Blender has it's home. The chapters are: Quickstart, Using Blender, Mesh modelling, Curves and surfaces, Special modelling techniques, Materials and textures, Lighting, Animation, Particale effects, Python scripting (small), The interface, The buttons. Everyone who likes Blender, will surely like this book.

This book is the best. I probably never would have been able to even start blender without this book. I was able to start a project the first day I got the book! The only thing I have against it is that it didn't cover the real-time portion of the program. But that's understandable, since they are still providing updates at their web site with a new version every month. That makes it hard to write a book on a program that is changing this fast. It is a good book for anyone who wants to start in 3D graphics and doesn't know anything, but If you have already learned a 3D graphics program it takes a little bit of adjusting. With this book you can create anythin your mind can imagine(well almost anything!)

"Not a Number is one of the Top 50 companies that will change the industry" -- CGI Magazine Who's Who, 2001. If you think "Blender" is something in your kitchen you use to make smoothies, think again. Not only is Blender a 3D animation package you can use for presentations, video production, or websites, it is a real-time, OpenGL, 3D gaming engine you can use to create your own computer games. It's not the easiest software to use, but it is truly powerful. (Hey, the software is free and the book is really helpful.)

In an interview I saw with the gang at Not A Number (Blender's brain trust), they referred to Blender not as freeware, but as "Priceless Software." It's true. This is truly the first Open Source movement that will affect the largest number of people from electronic media professionals to hobbyists. If you want to try before you buy, there is a sample chapter on the Blender/Not a Number website.

the first thing I noticed (second day) was the pages started falling out of the "book". Its not actually bound like a book, more like a fat magazine. As for the content, the author tells it like it is up front when he says "this book is a TOUR" of blender. That word is the key. Its not an in depth analysis, it won't answer all your in depth detailed questions, but it will give you a tour, or overview of blender. For detailed how-to's go to the tutorials on the net. This book is not worth what they are asking for it.

Nan did a good job writing this book, and it's really helped me improve my blendering. Its not as technical as the 1.8 guide, so you might want to purchase that if you want to know the function of every button in blender. Also, since the latest version of blender is 2.20, it is missing explanations of some of the new features, such as the revised IKA solvers. They will be releasing the 2.20 guide this year .... PS. In the eshop, they have the 1.8 guide for 15 or so bucks.