New book: Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT
John E. Herreño writes:
Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT is a new book from Packt, containing challenging and fun projects which covers areas such as modeling, shading, lighting, compositing, animation, and the game engine. Written by John E. Herreño , this book will show users how powerful and capable Blender 3D is when its full potential is exploited.
Overview of Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT
- Exciting projects covering many areas: modeling, shading, lighting, compositing, animation, and the game engine
- Strong emphasis on techniques and methodology for the best approach to each project
- Utilization of many of the tools available in Blender 3D for developing moderately complex projects
- Clear and concise explanations of working in 3D, along with insights into some important technical features of Blender 3D
Link
- Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT (Amazon)
long time without seeing the sketch rig in action!!
this book seems very interesting
Greetings
“push your skills to the limit” ?! Judging from the end results, perhaps that statement should have been chosen a bit more carefully. While it’s fantastiv to have beginner books, the title is a bit misleading.
Cool vid, but I say no to Packt Publishing. They have poor quality control.
Don’t forget, people: You can win a free copy of this book by participating in the HJ Media Studios Blendswap model contest.
Another good book on Blender.
Hi!
The “push your skills to the limit” line is better understood if you read the “who’s this book for” part of the description (forgot to include it). The book is intended to help people with basic skills to learn mostly techniques and methodology to approach more complex projects; it also serves as a nice walkthrough over most of Blender’s functionality.
@hjmediastudios: I didn’t know a copy was included as a prize for the blendswap contest! that’s great.
Nice book, although I doubt this is the correct format for learning Blender. Video tutorials are a lot more educational for beginners. Maybe video tutorials (real time, not time elapsed) could accompany this book to clarify some aspects which are difficult in words or which the author glosses over.
I can sort of understand why the autor is releasing a book instead of video tutorials. There are plenty of (free) video tutorials out there and a book is something physical, which people are more willing to pay for.
@Olaf:
I realise I might have severely unpopular view, but IMHO books are of at least the same learning value as vids. Vids are cool. Vids are easier to follow. But I find vids extremely unfriendly as a reference while solving actual design/animation problems. E.g. I watched tons of vids on a certain topic (50+ hours), and sometimes I need to find a single piece – a solution to a problem. Now, where was it? Vid #5 or #17? Time 1:11:13 or maybe 3:14:00? Until tutorial vids will have some kind of indexed, searchable subtitles, they can’t fully replace books.
@Greg
Nicely put Greg. I am in total agreement. Hard copy and the “hypertext” of an index are hard to beat.
I’m with Greg on this one – especially when you’re new, a lot of your study will involve cross-referencing and going back to see how something was done. Video tutorials are horrible for this, particularly if there is only one step that you want to see and you have to keep going backwards and forwards in the video to find it.
Also, and this might just be a personal thing, I find spoken information quite slow. Video’s that need to explain a lot of theory can be quite frustrating.
… And while I’m griping, I really wish the folks who make the tutorials would explain *why* they are doing something, instead of describing *what* they are doing when you can *see* what they’re doing! The various blender tutorial sites are all doing an excellent job, but they’re all are guilty of this one.
I agree with Greg, too. Personally, I use video tutorials to quickly see how something is done, but I never try to follow them. When I want to actually put a new technique into practise I find a good written tutorial.
Chapter 9 of this book is freely available from packt’s website. I’ve just this morning started following it and have already learned a couple of things I didn’t know, which is good. However, at one point there is four pages of text without a single picture. In my opinion, every single step of a written tutorial needs a picture so that the user can check that they are following the steps correctly.
One minus against vids for me:
ALWAYS want to sleep when I look to some tutorial :)) It’s like a lullaby. I don’t remember any voice that could not close my eyes at this process. Only very short tuts (like those last from Greg).