Rating: 
Summary: Great Stuff!
Review: I use Linux at home takes well designed. It the customers eagerness out of the way by guiding you, literaly holding your hand, threw the process of making a simple 3-d animation of a ball moving across the screen with lighting and shadowing effects. Then it explains the GUI and how to use the program, by constructing simple shapes and items to get a feel for the program. It is worth five times it's weight in gold. Powerful, versitle, and mulit-platformed.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for Beginners, or experienced users
Review: If you are new to 3d, or you want to support the open source movement, or you are a starving student who can't afford the large 3d apps, here is your solution. This application is awsome(and free). Blender is a Freeware 3d application, and there is a huge user community that uses it. You can also use blender to make "3D GAMES". Thats right, blender itself can make 3d games(yup, like those quake like games), and you don't have to be a hardcore programmer to be able to tackle it. Now, if you want to learn blender, this guide is a definate asset. I went to the store, and I thought, "na, this isn't that great", so I put it down. I assumed it was more for beginners. Then I started to use blender again(after a year of not using it), and man...I was looking for questions all over the internet. So I went back, and bought it, i'ts worth every penny! Trust me folks, this book saves major time. And the tutorials are written quite well, except some terminology is not for the new-to-3d-user.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty and Useful
Review: If you don't have time to learn Blender the hard way (and you'll need alot of time to learn it without instruction) this book is essential. Face it, for the beginner, learning blender without some kind of guidance is a strange kind of torture. You feel stupid and frustrated and cannot shake the feeling that everything isn't working properly. This book provides the operational foundation, interface concepts and design methodolgy needed to begin to educate yourself. This book won't show you everything, nor turn you into an ace Blender dude, but it will provide the understanding necessary so that you can effectively play and teach yourself. One word of caution concerning Blender, it is an awesome package, but it is finicky about video cards. It can get quirky and flake out on many popular cards. The recommended card is any nVidia card especially any of the GeForce line. Forewarned is forearmed!
Rating: 
Summary: Great reference, lousy learning tool
Review: It is quite obvious this book was written by well educated and logically minded people. Unfortunately the majority of those engaged in 3D art work are not so logical in their thinking. The learning curve is exacerbated by walking through a particular feature or function, but once. Having a reader recall "Where was it I learned that?" as a sub-set in each new section is more than most of these users will comfortably tolerate. A more favorable approach would have been to include a minimal discussion referencing a preceding topic in each section. Continue such as one progresses through the book and reduce the sub-topic to a previous reference where most should master the talent; i.e. build on what we learn. Publishing a book which is a collection of disparate subjects is fine as a reference for those individual topics. There has yet to be a publication that takes a user through a complete Blender project, start to finish, adhering all topics together as one in the one application. Publishing such a book would certaining lower the understanably large learning curve and increase the count of satisfied Blender users. Yes, I am including the original v1.8 manual. ;)
Rating:
Summary: They did a good job on this book
Review: Nan did a good job writing this book, and it's really helped me improve my blendering. Its not as technical as the 1.8 guide, so you might want to purchase that if you want to know the function of every button in blender. Also, since the latest version of blender is 2.20, it is missing explanations of some of the new features, such as the revised IKA solvers. They will be releasing the 2.20 guide this year .... PS. In the eshop, they have the 1.8 guide for 15 or so bucks.
Rating:
Summary: Binding falls apart, many projects lack instructions
Review: The only real advantage to this book is that it can be found cheap. You can solve the binding problem by having Kinko's or somebody put a spiral binding on it after you pull it apart. The projects are almost always lacking in complete instructions and more often then not will ask you to do something that hasn't been explained yet. Real time projects are not in the book at all. Time spent with it is not a complete waste as long as you realize that you will not be able to complete the projects as presented.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: This book is the best. I probably never would have been able to even start blender without this book. I was able to start a project the first day I got the book! The only thing I have against it is that it didn't cover the real-time portion of the program. But that's understandable, since they are still providing updates at their web site with a new version every month. That makes it hard to write a book on a program that is changing this fast. It is a good book for anyone who wants to start in 3D graphics and doesn't know anything, but If you have already learned a 3D graphics program it takes a little bit of adjusting. With this book you can create anythin your mind can imagine(well almost anything!)
Rating:
Summary: Open the door to Blender
Review: This guide provides a wealth of information about the powerful, sometimes confusing, Blender 3d package. I'm not sure how far I would have gotten with this package without this book. If your interested in learning about 3d animation and rendering, buy this book first. The package is free (...), the book makes
it useful.
Rating:
Summary: Open the door to Blender
Review: This guide provides a wealth of information about the powerful, sometimes confusing, Blender 3d package. I'm not sure how far I would have gotten with this package without this book. If your interested in learning about 3d animation and rendering, buy this book first. The package is free (...), the book makes
it useful.
Rating:
Summary: Quite Disappointed
Review: Till now I don't understand why this book covers incomplete commands for the programme. Although the book has a good explaination of the fundamental concept of 3D modeling or animation, the incomplete introduction just hinder the learning process being effecient. Even I can't find a lot of the commands in the index until I search it on the web (in accident!). For the beginner, this book is not a good choice except you think that it is worth while to save time by paying money. But is the incomplete guide book worth originally US$50? I don't think so...
|
