Book: Blender 3D Basics
A new Blender book by Gordon Fisher has hit the shelves.
Gordon Fisher writes:Packt Publishing is proud to announce Blender 3D Basics. Blender 3D Basics takes the beginning Blender user through the process of doing 3D animation with Blender, keystroke by mouse click as well as providing a background in classic animation principles. Blender 3D Basics teaches you in a gentle step by step manner. It makes sure you have a good solid foundation in Blender, allowing you to progress quickly in your mastery of modeling, animation, lighting and camera work.
Among the topics covered are:
- Mastering the Blender interface
- How to create 3D objects in Blender
- How to compose a scene ready for animation
- Loading, saving, importing and exporting various file formats
- Create a full animation using key-frames on a timeline
- Adding simple materials and lighting your scene
- Rendering and compositing the final animation sequence
- Doing stereoscopic 3D
I just wish Packt would put some more work into the cover. This one looks horrible and drab – certainly not good advertisement for Blender!
Link
- Blender 3D Basics (Amazon.com)
Agreed. The cover makes it look like it’s from the early 90s. Also I’ve never been very pleased with Packt’s printing quality. Smeary low contrast black and white images, cheap paper. Unless they’ve upgraded their process since the last book I got.
I looked at the preview on Amazon and apparently they’re still using grayscale images. $50 seems pretty steep for such a poor quality product.
And it doesn’t even come with a CD or DVD? Why is the price so high? They should look at New Riders for an example of a great quality book, with full color slick pages, and DVD training, that costs 40% less than what this book costs.
50$ for this… is crap! :) Sorry I couldn’t resist to write this!
It’s a shame to try to sell something like this and so expensive. And Packt is also ashamed by such materials. Somebody can see this on Packt and decide to choose not Blender but some other 3d package thinking of that Blender can do only this. Packt acts stupid when not checking all this stuff.
Directly addressing the point about price raised here.. Full colour printing is surprisingly expensive for niche products like training manuals, that’s why they are typically just B/W affairs, even books from bigger players covering more mainstream software cost a lot relative to the average paperback.
Tony Mullen’s books are not expensive and they feature color and a companion DVD.
Good thing! But that cover is really poor one. :-( It doesn’t inspire much people to go Blender and it projects feeling, that Blender is only for hobbyists and not for serious work. Pity!
It projects mostly feelings of “Blender SUCKS”. Which isn’t true at all.
The cover looks awful. The motive doesn’t make much sense. It is absolutely useless to show what you can achieve with the actual version of Blender. A step in the wrong direction. Too bad, the author seems to be a pioneer – maybe he wasn’t asked about the cover.
Yesterday we saw the Journal Cover Designs, so we know that this book should have a better image on the cover.
Another ”introduction” Blender book, would be cool to have more advanced material for blender.
Seconded!
I wish it all the best though!
Man that cover is seriously disappointing. But why or why is it only beginners books out there and who would buy one any ways the are so many free beginners tutorials. Its the intermediate stuff that is not well covered.
Yes about the cover that’s what I thought too, what is that? Basic plastic models? However must of us said that because we aren’t Blender beginners and we think in more detailed textures, lighting, renders etc etc. Well when we are totally 3D clueless something like Toystory is what we think to start with. My first book had captain Blender, and I was extremely impressed with that model ! So real looking PLASTIC and RUBBER ! WOW great. Years later now I noticed that that book was aimed to beginners, now I look for more complicated stuff like Reptiles models and textures. So let it be. I had a lot of trouble designing Captain Blender even using simply materials ! Imagine if the author was have taken me to UV maps and texture painting-normal maps and complex rendering? That book would have probably ended in the shelf forever. One step at a time guys ! BEGINNERS GUIDE is the name of the book.
It still could have looked 100x better with the same technical knowledge.
Very uninspiring in deed. I am certain that cover won’t help sales.
And if it is for beginners, why stereoscopic 3D.
My eyes hurt.
Ugly ugly cover. It’s not so much the basic models that bother me. It’s the the design in general. Terrible colours and terrible 3d type. And terrible regular type. Who ever designed this and thought “This is nice” is a shame on graphic designers. I could have done something easily better with those basic models.
OK, everybody mentioned about the crappy cover already :) I’ll say another thing:
Here are too few points for beginners… It looks like a 1/4 of a normal course. And stereoscopic isn’t really a bonus.
Gordon, maybe you’re a genius or maybe you want just a 3$ for this book… But users deserves some more complete guide to this (already) powerful program. Don’t think if somebody will see how many things it can do then they just will be scared and will not buy the book.
It’s already been said many times, but yes…that cover is GHASTLY!
yes, i hope the content of the book is much better than its cover… it looks like 3d graphic from the 90’th.
Should’ve put the blender logo on the Blender Machine as the standard color. :D Looks good anyways!
What version of Blender did they use for that cover…..1.05?? eesh!! =[
worst cover ever
They still make books?