The Book of Blender Gotchas
Andrew Buttery presents ‘The Book of Blender Gotchas’, an e-book that lists 100 common Blender issues and solutions.
Andrew writes:got·cha noun \ˈgä-chə\
An unexpected problem or unpleasant surpriseThe first book from Andrew Buttery, lead trainer at Blender Training is now available. The Book of Blender Gotchas features over 100 solutions to some of the most common and frustrating problems (“gotchas”) experienced by Blender users.
Blender is very powerful and flexible 3D design and animation software which can help make your dreams a reality be it film animation; architectural visualization, games or 3D printing.
However, with power and flexibility comes complexity. Blank renders, objects disappearing, strange deformation of meshes are just some of the examples covered.
For inexperienced users resolving complex problems can take hours if not days.This book is useful for everyone as even experienced users can make a mistake and not understand why their scene is broken.
If this book saves you just an hour of frustration searching Blender, the Blender Wikis or asking questions on Blender forums then it will be worth it!
Normally $US 25, to celebrate the launch get 20% off until the end of April. You can download a sample chapter here.
At first I thought this was a very late April 1st joke. If the author has found 100 ‘gotchas’ in Blender, would he please also write a gotchas book for Microsoft Office? The volume for Word alone should run to 500 pages, and will save 100m+ man hours over the next year or so.
Definitely on my wish list, there seems to be many “nuggets” in this.
I find that learning curve on Blender to get to an intermediate user stage is pretty long (2 years part time, at least), so anything that reduces that long runway is fantastic.
Something is amiss here. The book is promoted as having more than 100 solutions to Blender issues. I bought the book and the index lists only 49 solutions, 83 pages including index and attributions. Mind you, I haven’t read the book yet so I may be missing something but at first glance I am a bit miffed.
I’ve asked Andrew to respond to this.
Hi,
There are 49 problems identified in the Index. Some problems have more than one cause and therefore more than one solution.
There are 101 listed solutions in the book at the moment (I expect that this number will increase with updates) and in some cases I lumped two or even three separate solutions to a problem under one solution heading so there are more than that really.
Hope this answers your question, you find the book of value and good luck with your Blender adventures!
– andrew
The price seems pretty steep for an ebook.
Hi roofoo,
How much is an hour of your time worth? $5, $20, $100?
I would conservatively estimate that I have spent 50+ hours trying to understand what caused the problems identified, researching solutions and, in some cases, reporting the problem as a bug, only to be told how the feature works by a developer.
Yesterday I received an email from someone who said that he wished he had the book two years ago when he started using 2.5x and gained value from it even though he is now quite an experienced Blender user.
So you can choose to go through the painful and at times frustrating learning process that I have or you can spend a small amount, learn a lot about how Blender works and focus on creating something awesome!
– andrew