The Official Blender 2.0 Guide w/CD (Miscellaneous)

By Sven Wouters

Book Overview

This book is intended as a travel guide, an atlas to the Blender World. Everything you need to bring your creative ideas to fruition is inside. Developed originally as an in-house tool for a leading... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0761535136
• ISBN13: 9780761535133
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Course Technology
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.5" x 10.8"

Customer Reviews

Great Stuff!

I use Linux at home takes well designed. It the customers eagerness out of the way by guiding you, literaly holding your hand, threw the process of making a simple 3-d animation of a ball moving across the screen with lighting and shadowing effects. Then it explains the GUI and how to use the program, by constructing simple shapes and items to get a feel for the program. It is worth five times it's weight in gold. Powerful, versitle, and mulit-platformed.

Guy from no where

To whom it may conern, I would like to stat my opinion about this great book. It is far most, the best book that I have ever bought in my life. The book goes into great detail and disgreation about how to do animations. It allows you to do so much. In two days, I has able to create great looking images. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in graghic animations in a blink of a eye. It leads you through with step by step instructions. For the cost though, It is worth it and you don't have to be a computer wiz to understand it. Thank you for allowing me to tell you about this great book and I hope that it helps you if you buy it in the future.

Knowing is not Doing

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'sP.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.

Buy it if only for the "priceless software"...

"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.