Mastering Blender (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Blender incorporates a dizzying amount of functionality in a single application, and learning to use all the tools as efficiently as possible is a daunting..." (more)
Key Phrases: render layers, texture paint, edit methods, Grease Pencil, Hello World, Blender Foundation (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Blender, the free alternative for professional-quality 3D animation is a complex program to learn, but once users become familiar with its power, they begin to seek more from it.  This book is the first of its kind to explore the more advanced features of Blender so that you can get the most out of the software. You’ll take your Blender skills to a whole new level with the featured in-depth coverage of intricate uses for Blender’s modeling, texturing, animation, and visual effects tools in a professional environment.

From the Back Cover

Create Amazing 3D Animations As You Build Your Blender Skills

Are you ready to push the envelope on your Blender abilities? This professional resource takes you step by step through intermediate and advanced techniques for Blender's modeling, texturing, scripting, game-creation, and visual effects tools. It covers advanced topics on sculpting, compositing, and video editing, as well as provides a complete introduction to Python® scripting suitable for people with no programming background.

Intermediate Blender users will explore specific workflow topics that will help boost productivity and enhance the quality of their work. Advanced users will find tips and techniques not covered elsewhere that will help them optimize Blender's functionality for professional projects. Learn how to create assets for use in a game engine, how to use Python in the game engine environment, and much more.

If you want professional tips to reach new heights and create visually stunning 3D animations in Blender, this is the book for you.

The CD includes Blender 2.48 installers for Windows and Macintosh, a source tarball for users of Linux and other flavors of Unix, and a variety of .blend files.

Learn video editing and compositing with the Blender Video Sequence Editor and node-based compositor

Learn advanced texturing tricks, such as how to use Blender's own 2D texture painting functionality to create game assets

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Sybex; Pap/Cdr edition (April 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470407417
• ISBN-13: 978-0470407417
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #13,966 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly a guide to mastering Blender - and definitely not for beginners., July 9, 2009

By	Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

I am a Blender wannabe. I know I'll never be anything more than a tinkerer with it and I certainly don't have the artistic ability to do anything serious with it. Blender is an open source, free 3D program with an impressive list of capabilities. In fact, Blender rivals commercial programs costing thousands of dollars.

"Mastering Blender" is the third Tony Mullen book I've read and it is as impressive as the first two. But Mullen's books are aimed at people who are actually quite proficient with Blender. As Mullen puts it, he is writing for "intermediate and advanced" Blender users. If you've attempted to use Blender, you'll immediately recognize that even achieving the intermediate stage of proficiency requires many hours of learning and doing.

That said, there is nothing that prevents the patient novice Blender user from reading, looking at the pictures and, in my case, gasping both at what Blender can do and at the people like Mullen who can do it.

The first chapter is actually helpful to inexperienced users, as it describes how you can gain control of the Blender interface.

After that, it is strictly for the more advanced and capable user. Sculpting and Retopo Workflow explores sculpting; Creating Realistic Images with UV Textures and Node-Based Materials covers texturing snd then Mullen moves into Video Compositing, which is a Blender feature I didn't know existed.

The next six chapters cover scripting Blender with Python, another revelation, and mastering the Blender Game Engine.

Mullen appears to be one of the most knowledgeable Blender users on the planet. His writing style tends to be matter of fact and very straight-forward. His coverage of each of his subject areas is very thorough. There are many large and clear illustrations.

Overall, though it is highly doubtful that I will personally ever be able to use these Blender capabilities, I really enjoyed learning about them through Mullen's ably crafted book.

Jerry

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Great Blender Title, May 24, 2009

By	Javadog_2008 (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This is the third title I have purchased from Tony Mullen. The first two, Introducing Character Animation and Bounce Tumble And Splash are geared more towards introducing Blender. This book is definitely aimed at folks that already have a working knowledge of the tool.
While this knowledge may be gained through various tutorials and other material available online, and Tony is the first to point out what materials he used and where to find them, he has a way of putting things together that make it easy to understand and give you a basis that allows you to find those materials and actually understand them.
If there was a critic it would be that some of the material, especially once he starts covering the game engine, could be a little better fleshed out. However, he provides .blend files so it's easy enough to look through those and figure out where he is going.

4.0 out of 5 stars Getting there is half the fun, July 19, 2009

By	Ronald J. Harris "Sir Ronald" (San Bruno, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

I mainly bought this book for the chapters on programming blender with Python and though brief, they actually went beyond my expectations. The three chapters on the Blender Game Engine (including one on Python Power in the BGE) also exceeded my expectations.

The rest of the material here is on other subjects that I didn't find as interesting but the presentation is generally thorough and systematic and will pay off for anyone who has the time and patience to work through it.

Much of the material is introduced through exercises presented in detail, with step-by-step instructions copiously illustrated with often hard-to-read screenshots (tiny black text on a gray background). My impression is that the exercises are frequently too detailed and too time-consuming but if you don't do them you won't feel you have really learned the material and all you will have gained is a general idea of the power of the features under discussion.

With many of the hard to follow, long and sometimes unexciting exercises, it surely would have been useful had the author provided narrated videos lessons in addition to the detailed written instructions. And while blend files of the completed exercises are provided on the book's CD, it would have also more useful had the author provided blend files at intermediate stages for comparison and so that we could skip repetitive parts of the exercises and still absorb a high percentage of the subject matter, especially when the subject is one that we really don't need to master fully today.

One unexpectedly nice feature about this book is that each chapters thoughtfully ends with a section labeled The Bottom Line that provides suggestions for further practice of the chapter material. Outstanding!

I've tried to write a couple of tutorials on blender topics for my own use to get a handle on difficult subjects - it's extremely challenging. The author deserves respect for having the smarts and perseverence to craft such difficult subjects into didactive and informative lessons.