Computering with Artist KDD

The book is written by 9 talented Blender artists plus Roland Hess, the editor of the book. The chapters are broken down into a tutorial and a discussion section. The authors are accomplished Blender artists in their own right.

The authors take you from installing the program, an introduction to 3D art and the Blender interface, through object manipulation, mesh modeling, multi-resolution sculpting, animation, rigging and skinning, shaping keys, materials and textures, UV unwrapping and painting, lighting, particles and compositing and rendering. Chapter 14 is about customizing Blender and Chapter 15 is about Blender bonuses that give brief explanations about what more the program can do than what is in the book.

There is a world of difference between this 3D program and 2D programs like Adobe's Illustrator and Corel Draw. The mouse commands are backwards for one thing. A similarity with Corel Draw is that you can zoom using the mouse wheel. This is a must have book if you plan on using Blender. The book is the first in a series that will be published on Blender. This book covers the basics of running the program. It goes into quite a bit of detail on how to build and manipulate a mesh and how to rig and skin it.

There will be more advanced books to come, but for the basics, this one's the cat's meow. There are many nuances to operating this software and it literally blew my mind how complicated the program is, but at the same time what kind of results you can achieve.

There are plenty of illustrations in the book with regard to the image you are working with and the controls and their settings. Albeit, the control illustrations are very small and for me I couldn't read them, but they are there. Have a magnifying glass handy if you want to look at the settings illustrations.

Blender is a very sophisticated program to be a free open source program. It makes animation calculations for you, if you do that sort of stuff. There are other 3D animation programs that costs big bucks that do the same thing Blender does.

Need help? There is a large Blender community out there to help. Tuft's University even has a free online class to teach Blender and there is also an online manual.

The book is amazing. The authors of the chapters hold your hand and explain step-by-step what to do to achieve the effect you are working on. I have read tutorial books before, but this one really put those other books in the shade.

The Essential Blender can be purchased from No Starch Press or O'Reilly Press online. Again, this is a gotta-have if you plan on running Blender. If you are familiar with other 3D programs like Poser, this book will get you up to speed in short order.

There is an accompanying CD with the program and Blender files to help you do the tutorials. There are other goodies on the CD as well, like a folder with text files of the chapters. If you plan on getting this free open source program, the money you will spend on the book will be well worth the investment. It's the Essential Blender.

It's Blender time! Gone to do some tutorials.

My time is up; I thank you for yours.