Review: The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics, Second Edition: Computer Modeling and Animation (2014)

• September 27, 2014
• James Skemp
• review

So much information

Many many years ago I did quite a bit with POV-Ray and Rhino3D, but as I got older focused more and more on the web.

While I'd heard of Blender many times in the past, I had also heard that the GUI wasn't exactly friendly for new users. But now, thanks to this book, I've been able to successfully start digging into Blender, and may be on the path to being more than just a beginner in 3D modeling.

This book focuses on a fairly current version of Blender (only 1 release back at the time of writing this), which resulted in absolutely no issues translating what the book tells you to do with what the application actually presents for options.

Starting at the beginning, the book starts slowly building up your knowledge of the software, starting with how to select and add objects, as well as work with the basic tools, before adding on top of that more advanced topics.

The tutorials during this are fairly simple, and generally have you create a new 'empty' file, instead of building upon a single file (although this does change slightly as the book progresses).

While I wasn't able to finish all 500+ pages during my initial review period, this is definitely a book that I'll be continuing through, and will undoubtedly revisited chapters as I continue to work within Blender.

The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics, Second Edition, is highly recommend for beginners to Blender, and seems like it would be useful for more advanced users as well. For this reason I give the book a full five of five stars.

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