|
The Official Blender 2.0 Guide
 |
Author: Ton Roosendaal, Carsten Wartmann, Sven Wouters
List Price: $49.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0761535136
Publisher: Premier Press (18 January, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 50,649
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 out of 5
|
Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Great reference
For those of you who don't know what Blender is, it's a modeling program which can bring results that look like they have been done with a thousand dollar program- only Blender is free. It also has game making support, and although this guide doesn't really cover that aspect of Blender, there is another book similar to it that does.As for this guide, I'd definately recommend buying it if you have the money and are serious about learning Blender. After all, it isn't easy starting out, and it offers a great start for beginners. However, the further you get into it, the more you realize that this truly is just a reference manual. Each chapter shows you a new technique for modelling, lighting, animating, and other things, but never really shows you how to apply it to your own models. One large complaint I'd have to make about this book is how it doesn't show you the "whole thing." And by this I mean each part shows you but one step which would be mandatory for completion of a larger project. Let's take for example the clock tutorial. You load up a near completed clock, and use a technique which allows you to easily put all the hour marks on without the pain of manually placing each one in the correct spot, facing the correct way. Definitely useful, but the tutorial would be so much more practical if they would just tell you how to make the *entire* clock. At any rate, if you go through the entire book and memorize everything, you'll be more than ready for the advanced online tutorials which you'll find on the Blender website. So I suppose what I'm saying is that this is probably the best reference you can buy, but it'll take lot's of practice (with or without the book) to actually make it worth your while.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Essential, but . . .
For anyone trying to learn Blender, this book is essential. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot of problems. Firstly, the book covers an old version of Blender and hence doesn't document any of the new features such as NLA. Secondly, it's a very poor translation by someone who clearly isn't a native English speaker. Some of the lengthly passages are almost unreadable. The index is also quite poor. However, as the software doesn't include any documentation and as it's difficult to cull sufficient information from the Internet, I would defintely recommend buying it -- warts and all.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Not enough
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.
Similar Products
· Linux 3D Graphics Programming
· Advanced Linux 3D Graphics Programming (With CD-ROM)
· The Official Blender GameKit: Interactive 3D for Artists
· Grokking the GIMP
|
