Official Blender 2.3 Guide: Free 3D Creation Suite for Modeling, Animation, and Rendering Paperback – 11 Jun 2004

Right then, well this blender tutorial book only cost me 1 pence. But is it any good?. Having previously used sketchup which has it's limitations I decided to try this blender 3d. It's not quite rocket science but comes pretty close to it. It relies very heavily on accurate geometry and physics and thus is quite complicated. In the real world car designers finish off with a wooded frame work which is covered in a mesh to which clay is added then sculptured to form the final shape. Blender is similar as you start usually with a cube which is then re sized and pushed and pulled via "cut loop and slide" function. A bit like molding clay. As an example a velociraptor on utube took about 6 hours to complete, And that's from cube to animation. And that's from some guy who knew what he was doing. You can buy these books, and that's up to you. You can also view and download several video tutorials from utube, some of which are quite good, others are not so good. Another words you can see a model been constructed and how it's done from start to finish. That way you also learn the important key board short cuts and menu selections.When I started it took about 5 days to learn how to apply the mirror modifier, then another five days to work out how to import a JPEG as a plane. The answers on utube. There are also several PDF tutorials which you may find useful.To apply glass as an example, you can't just simply click on glass and hey presto. You have to set the transparency level accurately and then apply the required level of "refraction" to the setting you require. That's the laws of physics by the way. So Blender is based on the real world. Thus if you can get your head around this you can do some amazing things!. This is not a game, it's real software based on the real world of geometry and physics.Having read this book it is very scientific and complicated to the new user. In my opinion as a reference book it's useful, but it won't help you make models. The utube tutorials are best for that.

3D modelling and animation packages are not famed for being easy to get to grips with and Blender is certainly no exception.Blender's interface is reckoned to be 'non standard' and can look quite daunting to the new user.I have found this book to be excellent both as a beginner and as I have become more experienced and needed the more advanced sections.Don't forget Blender is a completely free program and contains hundreds of advanced features more often seen in professional software costing thousands.My advice to anyone wanting to have fun with 3D is - buy this essential book. If there is a downside to the book it is that some sections are written by authors who do not have English as their first language and a little imagination is sometimes needed to understand a particularly technical point.By the way the book contains 768 pages

Ok if you are new to Blender and you don't know how to use it, you tried reading tutorials on the internet, but found it out of date.. well tell you what This OFFICAL BLEDNER book is there for you newbies, this book works you through different parts of the program it also contains a cd for you to install blender with no matter what platform you are in. I personally found this book really good......its a bit dull but to be honest the team that wrote this have put alot of effort in trying to teach the users how to use the program, so that is why I gave five stars.