Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that is
a real alternative to commercially available 3D design
software. A cross-platform software package with millions of
downloads annually, Blender is now one of the world’s most
popular 3D design tools.

Although Blender is free, it’s intended for design
professionals and others motivated to become 3D artists. The
Essential Blender will provide you with the knowledge you
need to help integrate Blender into your work and begin to
master its powerful creation tools.

If you’ve never tried 3D design before, an introductory
chapter will familiarize you with relevant terminology and
concepts. If you’re already experienced with commercial 3D
software, The Essential Blender will get you up to speed
with Blender quickly.
After a tour of Blender’s 3D modeling, animation, and
rendering capabilities, you’ll learn how best to use Blender
for these tasks:

Object manipulation and animation
Mesh and sculpt modeling and shape animation
Materials and texturing (including UV unwrapping)
Lighting and rendering
Particle animation
Character rigging and animation
Node-based composition

The book is modular in its approach, with each topic
addressed independently and accompanied by hands-on tutorial
sections.

The combined expertise of key members of the Blender
community, coupled with the experience of editor Roland
Hess, bring you The Essential Blender-the definitive guide
to Blender. You’ll find a wealth of 3D design information
inside that will help you to unlock your artistic potential
and get the most out of Blender.

Includes a Complete Version of Blender 2.44 on the CD-ROM.
Covers Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (x86 and PowerPC), Solaris,
FreeBSD, and IRIX.

Editor Roland Hess is a professional writer who has used Blender for almost a decade.

Ton Roosendaal is Blender’s creator and the chairman and founder of the Blender Foundation, the non-profit organization that maintains Blender under the GNU/GPL license. He co-authored The Official Blender 2.3 Guide, The Official Blender GameKit (both No Starch Press), and The Official Blender 2.0 Guide (Premier Press).

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that is a real alternative to commercially available 3D design software. A cross-platform software package with millions of downloads annually, Blender is now one of the world’s most popular 3D design tools.

Although Blender is free, it’s intended for design professionals and others motivated to become 3D artists. The Essential Blender will provide you with the knowledge you need to help integrate Blender into your work and begin to master its powerful creation tools.

If you’ve never tried 3D design before, an introductory chapter will familiarize you with relevant terminology and concepts. If you’re already experienced with commercial 3D software, The Essential Blender will get you up to speed with Blender quickly. After a tour of Blender’s 3D modeling, animation, and rendering capabilities, you’ll learn how best to use Blender for these tasks:

Object manipulation and animation

Mesh and sculpt modeling and shape animation

Materials and texturing (including UV unwrapping)

Lighting and rendering

Particle animation

Character rigging and animation

Node-based composition

The book is modular in its approach, with each topic addressed independently and accompanied by hands-on tutorial sections.

The combined expertise of key members of the Blender community, coupled with the experience of editor Roland Hess, bring you The Essential Blender-the definitive guide to Blender. You’ll find a wealth of 3D design information inside that will help you to unlock your artistic potential and get the most out of Blender.

Includes a Complete Version of Blender 2.44 on the CD-ROM. Covers Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (x86 and PowerPC), Solaris, FreeBSD, and IRIX.

Blender is the only free, fully integrated 3D graphics creation suite to allow modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, and real time interactive 3D with cross-platform compatibility. The Essential Blender is the must have book on Blender. Following on the heels of the very successful Blender 2.3 Guide, this latest book from the Blender Foundation is the official guide to learning the fundamentals of Blender. The Essential Blender is appropriate for people new to Blender or curious about the latest changes the software. The book covers modeling, materials and textures, lighting, particle systems, several kinds of animation, and rendering. It also contains chapters on the compositor and new mesh sculpting tools. For users familiar with other 3D packages, separate indices reference topics using the terminology in those applications. The book includes a DVD with Blender for all platforms as well as the files and demos from the book.

Very, Very Difficult To Follow

I found this book extremely difficult to follow.

Blender is non-user friendly and unintuitive as is (3DS and Maya are entire orders of magnitude easier to use). The book was somewhat helpful, but...

The tutorials in the book are too ambitious and throw too much at you at once. The mesh editing should not have started you out with that bridge building tutorial (Chapter 4).

There are a lot of intermediate steps without figures to show you what something should look like. It’s very easy to end up with something that is very different down the line (after a number of steps have been completed) but could have been fixed if you had been shown the results during each step. They should have taken it in smaller steps (broken up into a few mini tutorials).

What was in this book as a few pages would normally have been an entire chapter (maybe a section) in other books. They try to compress too much information into too small a space.

Also, the figures that are referenced are not in colour and are somewhat small. I could barely tell what lines or vertices they wanted me to select, etc... It was a nightmare. I had to use a magnifiying glass to look at the figures in order to figure out what was being referred to.

Essential Blender

If you want to learn Blender this book is the way to go. This book with the many video tuts on line will have you mastering Blender in no time. If a 70 year old can understand Blender, (which I am) than most anybody can. Roland is clear in his information and takes you step by step. I just wish that some of the illistrations were bigger. That didn’t stop me from learning. Loved the book.

Best Book So Far

If your just starting off in blender this is the best book to do it with.

Needs more work...

This book falls into the usual trap for books trying to explain 3D graphics - greyscale images. Some are so vague, they’re indecipherable.

Worse, many of the graphics are so small as to be readable (I suspect) only with a microscope. I gave up trying to set my parameters to those shown in a shown figure while following a tutorial.

The features covered seem thorough - remember this is the ’essentials’ of Blender - it’s just a pity the dreadful presentation of the pictures lets the whole endeavour down.

Great information - Shame about the diddy diagrams

I would love to give this book five stars - the written content really is very good. It makes no claims to be a complete manual and what it does cover is more than a beginner needs to get started.

Examples are clear and the book is sufficiently modular in its composition that you can dip into the bits you need for reference - you do not have to read, understand and inwardly digest every page before you can do anything.

It’s not expensive, it’s easy to follow and it’s very, very informative and it would be a five star book if it weren’t screen shots. As any blender user knows, the interface is large and complicated and attractively designed in muted tones. So WHAT ON EARTH where the designers thinking when displaying them in tiny 5cm wide boxes? The paper on which the book is printed exacerbates the problem as its rough finish (nice normally) means the image reproduction comes out rather dark - flattening all those nice muted colours even further.

Fortunately, as I said, the text normally is clear enough to suffice and I still would heartily recommend this book. Just a shame about those images...

Need to learn Blender? Start here.

This book is composed by 372 (black and white) pages featuring 15 chapters, describing Blender 2.43 and later bug fix revisions in its essential features needed to start working with this wonderful piece of always evolving software. The book try to "hit" the biggest audience possible and it is tailored to three kind of people: those who are completely new to 3D and Blender, those who are new to Blender but have reasonable 3D experience (and maybe want to read the book for software evaluation)and those who already know Blender but need a refresh in their knowledge to fill the gap with latest Blender development.
This book has been written by well renowed Blender artists and chapters are packed and extended in a wonderful book by editor and lead author Roland Hess. Each chapter speaks its own voice, so you can read the book in a non particular order and they’re divided in two parts: a tutorial part (in which you explore main tools and techniques with a "learn by doing" approach) and a discussion part in which more detailed concepts are explained, completing the topic with further advices and tips.
Chapters are grouped by topic (basics, modelling, animation and rendering) and they are:

Chapter 0: How to Get Blender and Install it.
Maybe this chapter is completely unuseful. If you’re interested in this software, probably you already own Blender, you know where to get it and you know how to unzip/untar an archive or double click on an executable to install it (depending on your operating system). Fortunately, it’s only 3 pages long and include a reference on where to get help when you need it.

Chapter 1: An Introduction to 3D Art (Roland Hess)
This 11 pages long chapter gives you a gently introduction to 3D art, how it is accomplished and what working with a 3D app means. It’s short but still worth reading, especially for those who are completely new to the 3D world. It describes the main differences between triangles and quads (and their relationship), the necessity of materials to achieve realism, the importance of modeling tools and an accurate lighting description and the (very basic) principles of animation, keyframing and rigging. Read this chapter if you’re new to 3D, you will surely be interested.

Chapter 2: The Blender Interface (Roland Hess)
As the title imply, this chapter gives you an overview of the Blender interface. Many new users gets frustrated with the Blender interface at first. This is no longer the case, as the chapter gives you nice informations on how to master the basic concepts to work proficently. After reading this chapter, you will finally appreciate this interface and you will be able to exploit the real potential of the efficient workflow it produces. Headers, the toolbox, the buttons window, orthographic/perspective modes, layout adjustments, all is covered here.

Chapter 3: Object Manipulation (Roland Hess)
No exageration, this is the most important chapter of the book. The material covered here will be used all over the book and it’s a description of the basic knowledge to use the program and its main tools. Many important principles described here are the basis of most of the Blender tools. This chapter is structered in a way you will work through a simple Blender project, complete with a keyframe animation.
Main hotkeys and functionality are covered and it will touch concepts like undo/redo, the meaning and use of the 3D cursor, adding objects to a scene, moving/rotating/scaling principles, transform manipulators and their activation/use, mouse gestures, object duplication, what empties objects are and how to use them, object parenting, the snapping menu (very important), layer management, object constraints and the basic of keyframing animation. If you are new to Blender and 3D in general, this chapter will teach you the basics of working with a 3D modelling package. A very well written and informative chapter. You will be surprised on how many topics can be well covered in just 37 pages.

Chapter 4: Mesh Modeling (contribution by Kevin Braun)
How to produce complex objects with Blender using its modeling tools. I really enjoyed this chapter. You will build a complete bridge with wonderfully decorated pillars. You will discover various kind of selection tools fo verticies, edges or faces, how to effectively use the mirror modifier, how to subdivide objects, the art of the knife tool, object extrusion, a good introduction of the proportional editing tool, the loopcut tool, edge slide, edge loop/ring selections, the use of the array modifier and much, much more... Even experienced users may learn something new from this chapter. Personally speaking, I liked the technique described to pull vertices into inline. This is used everywhere in modeling but it wasn’t described in any book I bought in the past.

Chapter 5: Multiresolution Sculpting (Tom Musgrove)
Multiresolution sculpting is an approach to mesh modeling that allows you to shape and add detail to a mesh by pushing and pulling polygons with specific sculpting tools (brushes), instead of direct manipulating vertices/edges/faces. Not much to say about this chapter, you will produce a nice detailed monster using the draw/layer/grab/inflate/pinch brushes. It will teach you all the tools needed for sculpt modeling, including informations on how to use a regular texture and transforming it in a brush. Mesh hiding to improve performance is also explained in detail. Advices and tips complete this nicely structured chapter.

Chapter 6: Character Animation (contribution by Ryan Dale)
Character animation is a huge field and not much can be covered in 23 pages. But this chapter make a tremendous good job in concentrating much of the key concepts of character animation in a good practical tutorial. You will produce a complete walkcycle and you will be introduced to various stages of the walkcycle poses. The Timeline Window, the Action editor and the NLA editor are the main actors for character animation production and they’re well covered in this chapter. Inverse Kinematic (IK) and Forward Kinematic (FK)are also introduced. Good the choice of presenting character animation before introducing rigging/skinning concepts (which are concepts explained in the next chapter).

Chapter 7: Rigging and Skinning (contribution by Ryan Dale)
The natural extension to the previous chapter. All the basic knowledge you need to create a solid rig and hook it to a mesh is here. You will be introduced to bone creation/manipulation, bone naming and its importance, bone layers, parent/child relationship with bones, IK (inverse kinematic) chains, constraints usage and explanations like Locked Track, Copy Location/Rotation, Track To, Floor, Stretch To and the IK solver. The skinning part (hooking the final rig to a mesh) covers the main concepts like the Armature Modifier, envelopes, vertex groups and has a nice tutorial on weight painting too for a fine control of mesh deformation. Rigging/skinning is the essence of character animation and naturally not everything can be covered here. The only complain I do with this chapter is that it doesn’t cover many useful constraints.

Chapter 8: Shape Keys (by Andy Dolphin)
Shape keys are the Blender implementation of what other packages call "morph targets" and it’s a new implementation of what Blender called RVK (Relative Vertex Keys) and AVK (Absolute Vertex Keys) in the past. Very useful in facial animation, shape keys are the way Blender implements mesh deformation in a time aware manner (animatable). This tutorial teach you how to create/edit multiple shape keys and how to use them in conjunction with the action editor to produce mesh deformations by editing vertex keys in the action editor. And it does a good job in this. After you read this chapter, you will have full control of these concepts.

Chapter 9: Materials and Textures (contribution by Colin Lister)
The chapter I liked less. It stresses a lot on real materials observation (and this is right) but it gives little informations on the settings meaning. You will produce a "wood like" material and you will enrich it with a coffee stain. It left out many interesting concepts on material creation and this is a real pity. It does not even mention the difference of having two texture channels with the same texture and two separate channels with the same texture. Fortunately, the discussion part of the chapter try to fill the gap but it’s still insufficient. I was expecting more from a chapter that’s 30 pages long, to be honest. There is nothing about shader editing with nodes. What a pity!

Chapter 10: UV Mapping (contribution by Modron)
Suzanne unwrapping! Modron will guide you through the art of mesh unwrapping, a refined method for texturing complex objects. As an exercise, you will going to unwrap the Suzanne mesh (Blender’s mascotte) using the automatic unwrapper (the easy method ...) exploring texture painting in the UV editor and in 3D view using texture painting mode. You will have fun with the live unwrap transform. Easy, informative and direct to the point.

Remaining chapters are a gentle introduction to the topics and are not advanced at all, but they give you the understanding you need to read more advanced material on these subjects.

So, from what I said so far, you have already understood we are speaking about a very good book to begin with, with many topics covered, useful to read more advanced documentation. A very good book, but still far to be perfect and these are the reasons why I give it 4 stars:

1) It doesn’t cover scene management (link/append features) also known as "the blender database" and the obData system. This is very basic knowledge (and unintuitive, I would say, expecially the obData system) so it really should have been covered in this book.
2) Figures are (sometimes) really too dark to be useful. Fortunately they can be downloaded from the support site (*).
3) It has many errors. Not bad errors but still it has many of them (again, look the support site).
4) It does not cover many new features since the 2.3 guide, so its use for updating your knowledge is limited.

(*): The book has a support site that contains an errata, all images used in the book and some additional files to play with.
You can reach this site at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Books/Essential_Blender

Conclusion: if you are a new Blender user (new to Blender and 3D) you should buy this book without thinking twice. If you’re new to Blender but you already know 3D, you should buy this book as well. If you know Blender and you have already read the 2.3 guide, you may want to skip this book and buy something more advanced and illuminating, like "Introducing Character Animation With Blender" by Tony Mullen, for example, if you’re interested in animation or "Bounce, Tumble and Splash!" by the same author, if you’re interested in physical simulations. New features can always be learned from the user manual on the Blender wiki, assuming you already have the basics.

Clarifying Some Things

I have not actually read through the book entirely yet, so I’m not going to address the content at all. What I did want to clarify is that there seem to be a lot of comments about poor picture quality. Okay - they’re not stellar full-color prints with 3D popouts. But they’re hardly as bad as I’ve seen them repeatedly described. I was a bit nervous about ordering this book, but the pictures easily compare to the quality of "Introducing Character Animation with Blender" by Tony Mullen (which, btw, are black and white as well), a book we probably all know and love (and I’m very glad I own). So, to those interested in buying, don’t let a bunch of negativity about image quality get in your way. I’m very much looking forward to using this book.

Good For Learning The basics

I am not done reading the whole book, but so far I feel much more knowledgeable about Blender. There are a few problems with the book though. A lot of the pictures are small and hard to make out, also they are not in color so showing off how Blender uses color for different modes is impossible. Overall it seems to be a very good book for beginners, it does skip a lot of more advanced features for other books to cover.

Great Book!

This is exactly what I needed to learn Blender - well written with lots of illustrations.

written well but poor illustration.

I think it is well written but the illustrations are rather poor. A book like this that teaches a subject dealing with imagery etc. should be well illustrated.

Poor book

I was not too satisfied with this book for the following reasons:

1. You might notice the book is not "Written By", but rather "Edited by"... It is clear that this book was a compendium of tutorials contributed by several individuals, and the book does not make this "seemless". i.e. Halfway through a chapter on a given topic, you are suddenly given information and instructions which were already covered earlier - so it can get VERY repetitive.

2. For a book on high-end graphics, rendering, raytracing, etc. etc. I was kind of dumbfounded that *all* of the illustrations in the book were not only black-and-white - but very small, poorly dithered images - often so small you literally cannot see what they are trying to describe.

3. *Many* of the step-by-step hands-on tutorials were poorly written, to the point of not being able to follow exactly what you should be doing - even after going through and re-reading several times.

4. Many of the tutorials walk you through doing stuff - but don’t expalain the theory or detail behind it - or at least well.

Great book, really easy to understand

I’ve wanted to get into the world of 3D modelling/animation for sometime. After looking at the likes of Maya and 3DS Max, I stumbled across Blender. As you know Blender is a free, open source fully featured(more or less) 3D modelling suite. As I am new to Blender, I chose to purchase this book. And I am not disappointed! I have worked through the first few chapters and I have found the book extremely easy to follow. Before using Blender, my knowledge of 3d modelling software was somewhat poor. Just by reading the first few chapters, its made me realise that Blender is not as daunting as it first seems, however, its still not easy to learn. If your a beginner to Blender, this books will be perfect for you!

Great lessons but generally poor images

Before I got this book I read that its graphics or photos were of poor quality. But even so, the book was very good. After purchasing the book and reading up to chapter 6 (still reading it, don’t have much spare time but doing an effort) I can confirm the photos are a little confusing sometimes since they appear kind of blurry or too small to appreciate the menu details. However, it’s not the end of the world and neither a reason to rate this as a bad book because the information it holds is priceless. It’s written in a very interesting way and I think I have learned more about Blender in 6 Chapters than the dozens of lessons I read on the online wikibook. Moreover, most of the time you can easily figure out what the image is supposed to show or things like that by checking the Blender GUI in your computer.

The book is written for Blender Version 2.44. However, I’ve read it using Blender verson 2.45. So far, I have found only a couple of times that the text in a menu changed or an option is no longer available because a new one, but obviously related to the old one, appeared in its place. But remember, I’m still in chapter 6 of 15. But I don’t expect to find many surprises or things drastically changed.

mied feelings

I found this manual a little hard to follow as the pictures provided have little or no color. With determination I was able to match the sample images (screen shots) with the real screen and in short order was creating an animated scene.

There do seem to be some bits and pieces of info missing but if you have the time to keep struggling on, you can make progress. I don’t want to say this was a bad book, it could have been better,,, a lot better,,, still, it is useful.

Great manual for beginners

The manual is very well organized and clearly the right choice for any person willing to learn, even if knowing absolutely nothing about this great software.

Lots of room for improvement

First off let me say that I have been living out of this book for the past month. My knowledge of 3d is very limited, but this book has brought me to a level where I now feel confident. With enough time I think I could create anything.

But this book has a lot of room for improvement.
*Book is black and white, this type of book should be color
*Some images are tiny. Important images are tiny. Because the images are tiny and black and white, its sometimes impossible to see what the author is trying to visualize, and you just have to guess.
*The author wastes time on parts that don’t really need elaboration, and does not elaborate on parts that really need lots of extra explanation.
*Rendering is not discussed until the very end of the book. It might be wrong, but it only makes since to learn from the beginning how to render.

But with its faults its still a good book for beginners.

Color scren caps available online

Yes, the screen caps are blurry. Some of them are nearly useless. But you can download color versions of almost all of them online, so this isn’t a deal-breaker. The book is unusually well-written otherwise. It has been indispenable to me in learning Blender...

it really is essential

Despite the wonderful proliferation of free tutorials on the web, I find this book much easier to follow and literally essential. It is written by a number of authors, so the pacing and content of each section varies a bit. But it is well written, making it very easy to follow for a newbie.
My one complaint is that the screen grabs are consistently hard to see, and it is impossible to read much of the text in them. I would gladly have sacrificed a point or two in type size for bigger images.

A good entry book to Blender and to 3D modeling in general

This is an excelent book for the aspiring 3D artist or the professional one who wants to learn Blender, but already got experience in another 3D tool.

I really liked the "Hands On" aproach. For each chapter, the book first shows a "Hands On" part where it put you right in the action. You get to use the tools you will be learning right on. After the hands on part, comes the discussion, where you will learn the names and functions of the tools you just used. This aproach is very easy to follow, as you will be learning concepts and names of things you already used, making it easier to remember.

One flaw of the book are the examples. It comes with a CD with blender 2.44 and some examples, but the book makes little to no use of them. The book could have exercises that actually use those examples, that way the reader could finish an exercise and open an example and just see if he did everything right.

Another flaw are the internal ilustrations, they are rather small, and sometimes the text reffers to them to show something that the small ilustrations can’t really show for lack of detail. This could be an excelent oportunity to use the CD, if it came with full versions of all ilustrations, this flaw would not be relevant.

Overall, its an excelent book, even if you are already a professional user but never used Blender before. The language is easy to follow and the examples show just how powerfull the Blender interface can be.

Excellent Learning Guide

This book is a excellent guide for learning how to use Blender and gives you a easy to follow path for learning the program. Unlike a lot of online tutorials I have found on using Blender, the book gives you a clear understanding on the use of the program and what hot keys you need to use.

It also breaks the process of building 3D models down into basic steps that get you quick results.

One of my qualms with this book is that it goes into character and model animation way to soon, before you even master Blenders interface and how to use the program.

Unlike a lot of other computer books, this book allows you to explore different areas of the program without having to start at page one, chapter one. This book reviews, in each chapter, what a user needs to know to learn more about the program and to work with the other chapters.

Argggh!!!

I’ll start with the positive. Blender, while powerful and flexible suffers from what appears to be an incredibly obtuse user interface. You must really want to use/love this software in order to traverse its steep learning curve. This book does help demystify some of that user interface and program work flow. However, the illustrations/photos in this book are simply appalling. Even with the great discount at Amazon the book is a poor value since much of this book is difficult to use due to its very poor image quality. Additionally, the writing relies on these images to convey information. So, rather than reinforce instruction given in the text, these poor graphics actually take the place of that instruction. This software is in dire need of a well thought out, layed out, and executed bible. While the software’s difficult user interface can be partially defended by the need to maintain multiplatform flexibility, the book cannot be defended for having an equally frustrating interface. Blender deserves better. It would be unfair of me, however, to not point out that this software is incredible, powerful, free, open-source software with untold hours of donated development efforts from many individuals. I imagine the book was developed using the help of many of these devoted developers. Blender deserves the support of 3d modeling, animation, and graphics profesionals, students, hobbyists. A well executed book or series of books would go far to support development efforts and build the blender community.

The Title Says it All

Like the title says, this book is absolutely essential to anyone wanting to learn how to use the free, powerful 3D modeling software otherwise known as Blender. It is extremely easy to read and makes learning the software fun. Every major aspect of Blender is broken down into small parts that are easy to understand and digest. The illustrations could have been larger so we could see more clearly what they were trying to concentrate on but I understand that it would only have succeeded in making the book more thick due to the intense amount of instruction already presented. I’m really glad I bought this book.

The Essential Blender, aptly named

This is without a doubt the greatest source for blender. It starts basic and grows from there. There is no chapter 1, basics; and then chapter 2 whamo!. I’ve dabbled with blender for 2 years and withing the first 3 days of using this book , i feel I’ve made more progress than I have since I first started using the program.

as for the pictures, they couldn’t put useful pictures in the tiny area anyways. All the pics are no the cd in a much higher resolution.

Good content, poor delivery

I’ve found the exercises helpful and the instructions easy to follow; unfortunately, the book is a failure. The pages were falling out of the binding before I even opened it to the first page. I am now at about page 80 and at least forty of the last pages are loose. I take good care of books and can sell them as "good as new" when I’ve finished. I wouldn’t ask postage to send this book to someone for free.
That said, I can go on to the illustrations. They suck! There is no way that I can make out any of the images. Whoever composed the book has no concept of the print media. The least they could do is to supply a link to a web page with the illustrations.
I repeat, the examples are helpful, competently described, and the book fills an obvious need or I wouldn’t be struggling with it as I am. I only wish the publisher would take another stab at this.

Essential Blender is the first book to read

Many of the comments are spot on. The book is a fun read, with excellent discussions on Blender and techniques. Yes, the interface is ’different’ but you will quickly learn the ins an outs as long and you follow along. I believe it is ’essential’ to work with the tool daily (perhapes 1 hour @ a minimum) in order to get a good feel for the tool.

One comment on the ’lack’ of color images.

If you go to the wiki below:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Books/Essential_Blender

You’ll see zip files with the images (HI - REZ!) along with examples and errata corrections. For the price of the software (FREE), purchasing this book along with the access to the wiki makes this an excellent first choice for noobs (newbies) as well as more experienced artists. Once you’ve graduated from this book, I’d begin reviewing the excellent online support and tutorials blender.org will lead you to. Also there are other books here on Amazon you should also check out to ’further’ your education.

I just wish there were local classes on this excellent tool here in Dallas!

For Blender Guys

If you want start learn to blender, this book for you! Paper quality little bit low but information of the book is very up to date. Some picture has problem about reading stand point. Examples are good. There are Step by step tutorials. This book good for reference also, and much more important think is you can support Blender foundation with buying this book :)

Happy Blender

A very good reference for those starting with Blender and Computer Animation at large

Blender is a free open source 3D content creation suite. "The Essential Blender" comes in as a reference book for it, which also features lots of the basics about computer animation (CA) and its different branches: modeling, animation, rigging, skinning, lighting, particles, compositing, etc. Most chapters in the book are approached in a two-pronged fashion, starting with a hands on section, walking the reader through the steps to implement a particular feature, followed by a discussion section.

The book is written in an easy-to-follow language, authored in great open source style: through the collaboration of multiple writers with an editor (Roland Hess) at the helm. It is structured in a progressive way, taking the uninitiated in the world of CA through a very well thought step by step process. This makes it a very valuable resource for people who are learning about CA and even other platforms such as Maya. However, it may be repetitive to those with an education or a background in CA.

Perhaps the biggest shortcoming in the book (the reason I give it four and not five stars) is the complete lack of color illustrations, which occasionally makes the visual examples unclear. Besides that, it’s a great reference for those wanting to jump on this very popular 3D design tool: so much so, that it even includes a complete version of Blender 2.44 on a CD-ROM it comes with.

Nice Content But No Color???

’The Essential Blender: Guide to 3D Creation with the Open Source Suite Blender’ is a really nice book with one FATAL flaw in that there is not a single color image within the confines of this book. I see this more and more and am continually in shock and awe at how books that relate to graphics and imagery can be published in simple shades of grey. This isn’t 1980 where it would cost an arm and a leg to get something published in color. You can go and buy color printers for only hundreds of dollars or less, yet publishing companies still decide to put books out like this where there is no color present.

As for the content of this book I don’t have many negatives to report. The content discusses the blender open source solution for creation and development, and it does so in a clear, concise manner. There are plenty of images in the book, and this is also essential for writing something that is usable and individuals can learn from.

I’m keeping this review short because from the positive side of things I can’t say too much because the fact no color is present is a major flaw. Having said this, I still give the book 4 stars because I feel the content is strong if you use blender or want to do open source modeling, but I would prefer to wait for version 2 of this book when the color issue is taken care of.

**** RECOMMENDED

Like it lots!

Well I just got the book this week, and can’t put it down! I agree that some of the shots could be better, but this is not a huge issue for me as the content of the book itself is very deep and very wide. It is an ESSENTIAL purchase for anyone who is new to Blender and dreams of doing his own film. I highle recommend it.

Utter and total disappointment

After paying for next day delivery, and loving the program itself, I was a little let down when the last ten pages fell to the floor the first time I opened it. The images are useless.
I hate to see the Blender name associated with something this poor in quality.

Expected much clearer visuals

The book is exactly what I needed to get my arms around the Blender software. The treatment is well organized and the examples are well put together.

I agree that the real downfall in this book is the extremely poor quality of the many, many essential graphics. Even with a magnifying glass, I could not see enough details to get the real value I expected from this work.

The fact is that you can download the text and visuals for this book from the web. (Not as simple as that, but still a fact.)

Another shortfall that affects all computer software books is the "frozen point in time" effect. The current version of Blender is 2.45. The blender community seems to be very active, so online assistance is not far away.

Illegible, blurry screenshots

If you want to learn a complex piece of graphics software, you want to see what you’re doing. Countless Photoshop books, Maya / 3DS Max books all make full use of full-color, high-quality images to guide readers along the way.

Unfortunately, Essential Blender fails to deliver legible, clear visuals. It’s absolutely impossible at times to see what steps need to be taken, or what button to push, because I can’t read the words in the screenshots. All of the images in this book appear pixelated and blurry, and I can’t imagine why they let this go to press. Even if they weren’t blurry, each screenshot is generally gray, lacking contrast. There are no color plates in this book either.

And the authors and editors of the book don’t even provide a complete set of high-quality screenshots on their wiki page, despite the numerous complaints that readers have lodged on software forums.

If you are new to Blender, stick to the online tutorials, or purchase Introducing Character Animation with Blender (which does a much better job when it comes to visuals).

Great book on the amazing Blender modeler

Blender is totally free digital modeling application. It runs on a number of platforms and is incredibly small in size. It contains Nurbs and particle modeling and Radiosity and animation. It was developed in Holland and a contains number of features found in Maya and Lightwave.

This is the book you need to take advantage of the free software. It gives clear examples and is easy to read. You can download a free manual over the net, but a book that you can hold in your hands like this one can’t be beat.

I’m soooo disappointed

I felt for sure this would be the blender book to end all blender books, the one and only true reference, no more looking at past editions, or the wiki, or the howto pages so I had preordered awhile ago....but....

First off, the book is split up into chapters which are written by different artist and contributors to the blender community, it is extremely well written, straightforward and laid out in terms which the average end-user can understand, not so much in the terms which seem to be obligatory among those authors who have to validate their 40k(minimum) plus educations with large words which you find in so many other books relating to 3-d software (I use blender, maya unlimited, xsi, and cinema 4d)I’m an artist not a darn doctorate of computer science! algorithms, wtf?!? I just want to create not be told what the chemical makeup of my oils are! I truly detest books like those which are written in such academic and presumptuous terms.
So for that I say five stars.

Now the downside, the pictures...it’s ironic a book teaching on how to use such a wonderful program which is meant to render incredible 3-d graphics and animation and yet they have black and white thumbnails as reference to what the author is saying...this is a major drawback when you need a heavily bookmarked reference at your side.
The thumbnails are so small I needed a magnifying glass just to see some of them, and even then they were terrible images. So in all fairness I must subtract 2 stars.

But hey, when you get right down to it, Blender is still up there with the big boys and it’s free!! But like I said, the writing is straight forward, it’s well done, it puts things in terms which make people realize that, as long as you have some artistic ability, you will be able to do it.

A guide for us mere mortals...

I’m not a computer expert, I’m certainly not an artist, and I’m not rich - I just wanted to construct a 3d animation to illustrate how a horse’s hoof works for an assignment. I got hold of a copy of the open sourced Blender 3D and then it began to dawn on me that it was really written by experts, for experts. If your not a computer whiz-kid or a professional 3d artist who is already familiar with the terminology and ideology, then you’re going to struggle.

Fortunately, Ton Roosendaal has come to the rescue with this book. It doesn’t assume you already know anything about 3d graphics, only that you are reasonably familiar with how to handle a computer and want to create a 3d work of art or animation. It explains all the concepts in plain English that even I can understand, with easy to follow instructions to get you designing and playing within minutes.

Maybe it’s not what experts have come to expect from 3d texts, but it’s a solid, understandable guide to the essentials for the rest of us.

A valiant effort, but...

...I found it to lack some of what I have come to expect from 3D software texts.

The positives about this book...

It provides a good overview of Blender and is very throughly illustrated. It contains information on features added with Blender 2.43 which can only be found in online forums otherwise.

But the book is structured in a somewhat irratating way.

The index of the book is not at all complete, so it does become frustrating when you want information on a specific topic. I have found myself either having to thumb through entire sections of the book to find the information I need (due to an index which really could have used a bit more consideration) or resorting in frustration to online resources .

As an example, I was searching for information on adding an audio track to my animation... nothing in the index whatsoever about audio... quite an oversight, I would think. I have encountered this looking for information on other topics as well.

Hopefully, this will not be a template for future publications by the Blender Foundation. Remember that proceeds from the book do go to the Blender Foundation, so that alone would merit buying the book, but even having said that... consider this book more an introduction and overview of the software, rather than an exhaustive and indispensable resource.