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Sebastian Koenig - Blender Unwrapping and Baking - Mammoth - Streaming Video Sebastian Koenig - Blender Texturing - Mammoth - Streaming Video Sebastian Koenig has created another 2 tutorial videos, using the previously made mammoth modelling tutorial (reviewed previously). I will not be doing a review of the 2 new tutorials as basically all the comments about the previous modelling tutorial apply to these tutorials as well. Basically excellent and worth the money although slightly more expensive given their run lengths versus their price. But still well worth the money.
Sebastian Review 90% (tutorial awesome information packed) cmiVFX Review 50% (delivery system stinks) |
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Roger Wickes - Foundation Blender Compositing - Book Review Well another week and another Blender book to review. This time around it's written by Roger Wickes a well known Blender user. I have reviewed other products made by Mr Wickes before and from what I remember I was impressed with them. This time round Mr Wickes has graced the world with a book on compositing techniques using Blender.
I was eager to get hold of this book and had it on pre-order the second I heard about it. Reason being that I knew there were no books specifically dedicated to using Blender for compositing tasks (at least when I ordered it). Also Mr Wickes has previously produced compositing videos that can be obtained from his website that also covered compositing. Those videos were very good and I was curious as to how this book would compare. The first thing that I noticed about the book was that it looked very thick and chunky, physically very well made and good quality paper, also pleasingly the pictures and diagrams in the book were in full color. Color pictures in any Blender related book are always useful and it definitely improves the usefulness of this book. Also handy was the color theme used in the screenshots, which made seeing the contents of the pictures much easier (the default gray theme of Blender really does not lend itself to being displayed in books). The book is reasonably priced (at least when you get it from Amazon), when you take into account that you get color pages and a DVD also which is packed with very useful examples and resources. A lot of Blender users see compositing as a bit of a black art. The end result usually being that they don't get a good grasp of how to use Blender's compositing abilities very well or they discover its power many years after they started using Blender. So you may think that this book is not for the beginning Blender user. This is not true. Mr Wickes has used a large portion of the book going over the basic functions of Blender as they relate to the tools needed to do compositing tasks within Blender. So even if you are completely new to Blender you should be able to pickup this book and learn how to use Blender to composite. Once the basics are covered (about halfway through the book), an almost complete treatment of the Blender Nodes Editor and Video Sequence Editor is covered (from the point of view of a compositor). Most of the useful Node and VSE features are described, both what they are for and how to use them. For the most part everything is very well explained and only very occasionally do topics seem vaguely explained (though that could just be me being a bit slow). Some theory of compositing processes are explained, although I would have liked more theory explanations (i.e more depth on pixel math etc. and maybe more information on the various way nodes can be combined to make different compositing setups). All in all very useful book especially when used in combination with the included DVD. I am going to have to keep an eye on the Friend of ED publishers of this book and see if they come out with anymore Blender books. I hope they do as if this book is anything to go by, it will be worth getting. Review Score 85% |
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Sabastian Koenig - Blender Organic Modeling - Mammoth - Streaming Video Review cmiVFX.com is a training site for the graphical and visual effects, covering many systems and platforms. cmiVFX delivers most of its content in the form of streaming video which can be purchased and watched online. The system requires the use of flash player for the videos to be viewable. I was debating with myself as to weather I should review this site or not for a number of reasons. The first being that the streaming videos are only available for viewing online (as far as I can tell). Which means that you constantly have to be connected to the internet with a good broadband connection to see the videos that you purchased. Obviously this is fine so long as you are connected and do have a fast connection. Unfortunately I don't have a particularly great connection speed so therefore would have benefited greatly from a downloadable version of the purchased video so I could watch offline. The second reason is partially related to the first in that the streaming technology they use seems not to allow hitting the pause button when I first starting a video stream so as to allow my connection to buffer more of the video before it starts to play to prevent skipping and buffering. This really annoys me as it is completely inconsiderate. After all I paid for the content I should really be able to press pause and have more of the video download to my machine before I start the video again. Third would be the fact that I really think the video formats should always be in open formats such as ogg and not be tied to having to use some sort of flash based system. From the above it should be clear why I was mostly against reviewing these videos. However, this was all before Sebastian Koenig decided he wanted to put some tutorials of his on the cmiVFX.com site. I mean really this is Sebastian, he does things with Blender that reach the levels of massively awesome (do a search on google for Sebastian Koenig Fly to see what I mean). Sebastian's tutorial covers the stages involved in creating a realistic model of a mammoth, all starting from a cube.
Issues with price aside, the video tutorials quality is very good in both terms of content and viewing quality (almost no fuzziness or pixellation artifacts). It is not a beginners tutorial though, you are really expected to know your way around Blender and be a reasonably good modeler. This is not surprising as the range of topics covered within the tutorial is quiet broad. Very helpfully Sebastian clearly describes what he is doing throughout the video and I had no problems understanding what he was saying with his accent (German I think) but then I am English. So if you have a problem with accents this could be something to keep in mind. Unfortunately there are no on screen key press displays in the video, though Sebastian almost always describes what all the keys are that he is using. The video covers all the stages involved in creating and modelling the mammoth from setting up a background image, using the grease pencil, box modelling, poly to poly modelling, subsurfacing, weight painting, using array modifiers, sculpting and such things. Extensive use of proportional editing is also gone through and even though this is not a beginners tutorial Sebastian does spend some time going through some of the basics for those advanced modellers coming from other modelling environments. So all in all the videos are excellent and the informational content is extremely good (not surprising given what Sebastian can do). And just on the content of what he teaches I would have to rate the video very highly. However the system that Sebastian is hosting his videos upon just makes me uncomfortable. If you are ok with a completely locked in system where you can't download the videos you legitimately purchased and can be sure to be connected to the net all the time and have an always quick connection, then you will be ok. The videos that are streamed are very clear and the interface is reasonably clear and doesn't take up too much screen space. Taking into account the issues I have, I think it only fair to give 2 review scores one on just Sebastians tutorial and another review score of cmiVFX.com video delivery system. I can only hope that Sebastian finds a better system for delivering his videos as they are excellent, or that cmiVFX comes up with a better more user friendly video delivery system. Sebastian Review 90% (tutorial awesome information packed) cmiVFX Review 50% (delivery system stinks) |
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Pablo Vazquez - DVD Training 4: Venoms Lab! - DVD Training Review The Blender DVD mill churns out another DVD this time it is by Pablo Vazquez of Venom GFX. The DVD is part of the Blender Open Movie Workshop Training DVD range. Pablo is well known to the Blender community as an awesome modeller and Blender user. Even if he does like the color pink way too much.
The start page indicates that Spanish language support is available on the DVD, this is true but only in terms of writing the webpages in Spanish. The videos still appear to be in English (after experimenting I found an option to switch to Spanish audio track but this really should of been sorted out when selecting Spanish section of the DVD or at least made very clear on the Spanish sections of the pages.). The price of the DVD seems reasonable to me given the amount of video content. Though some may find it expensive, although with the DVD being Blender Open Workshop some of the cost of the DVD go towards funding further development of Blender. The DVD is split into 10 Chapter like sections, each Chapter uses a different character model to describe various features and workflow methods of Blender. Below is a list of Chapters:
The version of Blender used in the videos is Blender 2.49, which is useful as some of the newer features of Blender are covered (Projection Painting for example). Overall the quality of the information contained within the videos is very good. Intermediate and Advanced Blender users will likely find something new in these videos. Also very handy are web links on the video pages which point the viewer to the various relevant web pages which go into more detail on the topics being covered. The videos are available in both flv/flash format (and playable in directly in a webpage flash player) & avi/high def (playable externally). To my eye both the flash version and high def versions of the videos were very clear and easy to see. Although some of the videos appear to be encoded in better quality than others. Also occasionally the screen encoding appears not to update quickly enough and results in the videos pixellating slightly. Though this doesn't happen often and even when it does it does not really affect the watch-ability of the tutorials. Another issue I had was that the audio seems to be slightly quiet and I had to really crank up the volume on my laptop to listen at a comfortable level. But again so long as you don't have a really noisy laptop things should be fine. I was slightly disappointed that the videos weren't encoded in Ogg Theora video format. But I will keep complaining until someone listens or everyone starts using Firefox 3.5. Like all good Blender tutorial videos all the key presses are highlighted on screen and Pablo is reasonably good at explaining by voice what he is doing also. Yes Pablos accent is slightly heavy going at times but unless your American you should be able to cope. All the Chapters of the DVD were very good but my personal favorites were the chapters covering Projection Paint and Material Nodes and the Compositing sections. The most disappointing part of the DVD for me was the 10th part which was basically a long timelapse video covering the modelling and texturing of a character model called Durano. It was entertaining to watch but I think the space and time it took on the DVD would of been better used on covering other topics in more detail. A little extra stuff is included on DVD which can be gotten to by browsing the DVD file structure. Also all the textures and blend files are also included on the DVD. One more extra thing which a lot of Blender users may find handy is having access to that hideous pink theme that Pablo uses when modelling his stuff in Blender. So if you want to overdose on the pink you will now be able to do it in just the same way Pablo does! All in all this is an excellent DVD well up to the quality level of previous Open Movie Workshop DVD Training series. Now I am going to go close my eyes till the pink haze disappears.... Review Score 85% |
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Tony Mullen - Mastering Blender - My thoughts I keeping up slightly more effectively this time as I have finished reading and digesting a new book that came out recently. It's by Tony Mullen so I was eager to get this one and get it read:
The book has 12 chapters and the book as a whole is divided into 3 parts. Below is a list of Chapters:
The book is aimed at intermediate and advanced Blender users. This is the first problem that I see with it. In that a lot of the information covered in the first 5 chapters, it's arguable as to weather the information is described in enough depth, so as to allow a truly intermediate/advanced Blender user to gain any useful information. In my opinion only chapters 2 and 3 out of the first 5 go into enough depth for an intermediate/advanced user. Chapters 1,4,5 do indeed cover some of the less well know uses of Blender but don't go into enough depth. A lot of the finer points of why things were done a particular way were not covered. To be honest if you were an intermediate/advanced Blender user you would already (or should already) know the topics covered in Part 1 of this book. So for Part 1 of the book, I would say the topics covered were limited. An example would be the information on the use of Nodes to make textures. The amount of coverage of something so advanced and as useful as texture nodes was laughable, a few screenshots and scant explanation of why they were used and the full potential of what can be done with them was never really gone into. It reminded me of reading an FAQ there was no depth and a lack of structure. At this point I was not at all impressed with this book, it was a shock because normally everything Tony Mullen touches is pure gold when it comes to Blender. Yes I know that intermediate/advanced books generally skimp on some details, but a good intermediate/advanced book makes up for the stuff they skip with extra stuff that people don't generally know. This is not the case with chapters 1 to 5. It may be that if you aren't an intermediate/advanced Blender user that you may get more out of Part 1, but even if this is so, you would be much better off getting Jason Van Gumsters book (Blender for Dummies), which does a much better job than this book in a lot of areas. However.... If we ignore Part 1 of the book and move onto Parts 2 and 3, things take a rapid upturn. So much so that all I can assume is Mr Mullen must of had a few off days while writing part 1. To me parts 2 and 3 are like reading a completely different book. These parts cover the use of the Python from within the Blender modelling environment and from the Blender Game Engine environment. In short these parts of the book are worth their weight in gold. They contain information that is often very hard to come by and is not very well documented. If you are interested in using Python with Blender this is the book for you. It is a shame that you have to work your way through half the book before it starts to get to really useful information. Another problem which counts against the book is that fact that it uses black and white pictures which unfortunately because of the quality of the printing were often not very clear and cloudy. This problem is partially eased because the book does have a colour supplement in the middle of he book. The problem is some of the unclear pictures did not have references within the colour supplement. Also reference was made so often to the supplement and there were so many pictures in the supplement that it would of been quicker to just make the book have all colour pictures to start with. I know this puts the price of the book up but it would really have benefited. The review score below would be much higher if part 1 of the book had been to the same standard as parts 2 and 3. This book is worth getting but only if you are interested in use of Python within Blender. Review Score 70% |
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Jason Van Gumster - Blender For Dummies - Thoughts on the Book Ok so I am not keeping up on my Blender reading list and it took me a while to get around to reading the Blender For Dummies book. I have been busy that's my excuse and I am sticking with it. Now however I have finally managed to read through the book. Here are my thoughts: First things first, I have to let it be known that I wasn't expecting much from this book given its title. I was of the opinion that any Dummies book would not be able to properly present the functionality of Blender without dumbing it down to an unacceptable level. After all Blender is a very advanced and powerful 3D modelling application suite, so what would be the chances of being able to convert some of the very advanced things that Blender can do into a Dummies book? Well I was wrong! Or arguably I think that title of the book is. If I had named the book I would of called it "Blender For Basic and Intermediate Users and Dummies". The Dummies moniker completely undersells what you can expect in terms of valuable information contained within the book. I probably should not have been surprised that the book is of a very high standard given that Jason Van Gumster is the author. A very, very talented Blender guru/user.
A lot of ground is covered in this book from the basics to some of the more obscure features of Blender that I did not know about. I think that the nearest competitor to this book would be the "Blender Essentials" book, which just recently was posted up on the Blender wiki for free. In terms of scope and how up to date the Blender For Dummies book is though, there is no comparison. The Blender For Dummies book wins in all areas. Obviously it's more timely, because it is a newer book many of Blenders newer features are covered. Blender For Dummies basically makes the "Blender Essentials" book irrelevant. It covers more topics in more detail than the Blender Essentials book. All the major areas of Blender functionality are covered with a few exceptions (proxy objects are not covered and really should of been given that other linking and appending methods were). At this point some of you will be saying that Proxy Objects are an advanced feature, however it's not a difficult feature to use (how difficult is it to describe ctrl-alt-p keypress!). Also the fact that other methods for linking objects were covered which are just as difficult and involved, so invalidating the it's an advanced feature argument. Python scripting wasn't covered in any kind of depth either, but this is to be expected in a book at the Beginner/Intermediate level of Blender usage. These gripes aside this is an excellent book, even people who think they really know their way around Blenders various features could probably get something from it as some of the things it covers are not widely known (making and using your own fonts in Blender using Family objects for example). I would say that this book is the best broad topic coverage book on Blender so far. Yes it is true that other book go into more detail on specific areas but they tend to limit the areas of information to specific topics. This book is a definite buy. Review Score 90% |
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William Reynish - Learn Character Animation Using Blender - Video Tutorial DVD Review I was looking forward to having a look at this DVD and have had it on pre-order from the Blender E-Shop for a while.
The DVD is another Blender Foundation endorsed release, so buying it from the Blender E-shop means that some of the profits from the sale of the DVD go towards funding the development of Blender. Given the runtime and the fact that some of price of the DVD goes into Blender, the price of the DVD seems reasonable to me. Some could argue that it is a little expensive but I think in the end it's worth the price if you are big into the Animation side of things. On opening up the DVD you are presented with a browser webpage which lists the 13 video tutorial sections on the DVD. The layout is nice and clean and worked well on my FireFox 3 browser. When clicking on one of the sections the video tutorial is displayed. Very useful are the 2 links at the bottom of each video tutorial that allow you to go back to the main start page and progress to the next video tutorial in the series respectively. That next link made viewing all the tutorials on the DVD much easier than having to go back to the main page and then click on the next section on the DVD main page. So interface layout wise the DVD does well. Now although the videos are very clear and encoded well, one thing I did not like was the choice of video format used to show the videos, which was MOV (quicktime format). Blender is open sourced and multi-platform, so why the choice of MOV format video? This is very annoying as a lot of Windows/Linux platforms will not want to play quicktime (either because they don't have the browser plugins installed, or they do not want proprietary stuff on their systems). What makes it worse is that there are completely open sourced and freely available video formats which could of been used (ie ogg theora video). Blender people really should know better than to use proprietary formats. I keep banging on about it but no one seems to listen! Anyway, assuming you have the appropriate plugins/codecs you will be able to view the videos in your browser or go directly to the MOV files on the DVD and open them in your favorite media player. Surprisingly no media players are included on the DVD so if you don't have the various things you need to view the videos you will have to go to get various players yourself. This seems lazy on the DVD producers part, players really should have been included on the DVD. There is note on the DVD detailing how and where to get the various players should you need them. It's worth mentioning that the DVD does not really cover anything but animation and does not go into any great detail on how to rig, model or texture characters. So if you want rigging details this is not the DVD for you. I personally feel it would have been helpful to include more information on rigging on the DVD but I guess they wanted to keep the DVD in a narrow focus. Given that modelling and rigging aren't really explained in any major way, the DVD includes various models and rigs which are used to demonstrate various features of animation. These come in very handy, especially if all you are interested in is the animation side of Blender, or do not know how to rig/model your own things yet. Below is what I though of each video tutorial section on the DVD: Section 1 - Blender 101 - Getting Started with Blender This section covers what Blender is and a description of what Open Source is and how it affects Blender. The various features of Blender are described such as its interface items and the basics of controlling objects with Move, Scale and Rotate. The section to me seem very clear, so clear that at the beginning it actually shows a picture of a mouse and the narrator says "This is a mouse". Some suggestions of what screen layouts to use while animating was also briefly gone over. All in all this section does what is says, gives the very basics, so that a new Blender user can follow along with what is mentioned later on the DVD. Section 2 - Workflow After the basics are covered from Section 1, Section 2 moves on to some animation theory. The narrators describes some of the different ways in which animations can be approached. Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose animation methods are described as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. The use of Breakdowns are also gone over briefly. Although theory discussions on a video DVD may seem strange, it really worked and was very clear, and later on in the DVD the information presented here really helped me. After this a simple example animation is described and the stages of developing and planning the animation are gone over. How to organise files and resources is also briefly demonstrated as is Proxy object use within Blender when linking in objects. Covering proxy objects this early took me by surprise, but for an animator who wants to get right into just grabbing a character from a library and animating, this info now is very useful. Section 3 (Rattling Bones) & 4 (Get in Role) The DVD comes with multiple free rigs for the user to use as they wish on their models. This section shows how to use them and adapt and control them for use on your own models rather than the ones the rigs were originally attached to. Bones and Armatures and using weight painting are explained, and the various Bone layers which are used to organise the various parts of Armatures (Deform Bones, and Control Bones, Face Bones and the like). The narrator does a very good job of explaining and showing how to do the adaption and control. This section will be very handy and will allow an animator new to Blender to quickly get to grips with making their models and meshs much more quickly animatable. Section 5 - Acting for Animators This section covers more general animation theory, concerning how to make the animations you create seem more believable and giving a sense of life and motivation to a character/object. Various pointers about animating the body and not just the face to convey emotion and intent are covered. The importance of the eyes is also explained and how to use them to change emotional states. Some examples are demonstrated to see the effect. This section was reasonably informative if a little slow. The screenshots were very clear and easy to understand. Section 6 - Posing This section goes over how to pose your character using Blender and describes more animation theory. The description of using a characters Silhouette for clear posing was very easy to understand, as was the information on Lines of Action and how to use them. A Blender specific feature that was demonstrated was the grease pencil which is available in the recent version of Blender. This is a very handy tool for animators. Covered in some detail was the difference between Forward Kinematics, Inverse Kinematics and Auto Kinematics and the relative advantages and disadvantages of each method of pose control. I liked this section very much as it explained Auto IK, and until this point it was not clear to me how this worked. In this section I have a gripe with the production of the DVD, as for a while the audio is all messed up and there appears to be 2 conversations going on at the same time, making what is being said difficult to decode. This does not last long but it really should have been spotted and corrected. Another issue I had was also about some of the advice given on character viewing and camera positioning. The narrator states that it did not matter how a character looks from all viewing positions so long as the view from the camera position looks correct. This in my opinion is a seriously bad piece of advice, and will catch out people. Section 7 - Keys and Breakdowns This section goes into more detail on using Key and Breakdowns in the Blender environment, giving examples of animations that don't have Breakdown keys frames and those that do. It is clear from the examples that the Breakdown Keys have a massive effect on the fluidity of animations. How to move update and add Keys is demonstrated in detail showing the tools at the Blender users disposal for altering Key positions. Section 8 - Weight One of the important features of making animations believable is the interaction of a character with objects of mass. In this section the narrator goes over some of the animation techniques and tips that should be kept in mind to correctly indicate weight effects between characters and other items. A brief description of center of gravity is offered and then this section is finished. So a small runtime section, but still useful information. It would have been nice to have more examples in this section to get the point across better. Section 9 (Walk in the Park) & 10 (Run) These sections cover the aspects of how to make Walk and Run Cycles within Blender. Useful descriptions of how to use Inverse Kinematics to make animated feet in a walk and run cycle stay still and not slide across the floor when animating. Asymmetry, to prevent animations from looking too robotic and unrealistic is covered also. Walk and run cycles are known for being one of the things that cause new animators no end of problems when they first start. This section did a very good job of explaining how to do it right and get good walk and run cycles. Section 11 - Arc Enemy This section demonstrates and describes the importance of natural movement arcs for joints such as arms and legs when characters are moved. The visualisation curve feature of Blender is shown and this really helps in describing the use and important of these arcs of movement when you can see the curves easily on screen. The Relax Pose feature of Blender is also demonstrated which I did not know about so I was definitely glad I saw this section. The advantages of using Forward Kinematics to help in preserving arcs of motion on certain parts of a characters joints are gone over. Again a very informative section. Section 12 - Flip Flop - Overlapping Actions In this section Overlapping Actions are described and demonstrated. Overlapping Actions are multiple animated movements that start close to each other in time but not at exactly at the same time. An example of Overlapping Actions is demonstrated using Big Buck Bunny character. Ideally I would of like more examples and description of Overlapping Actions but this section is still useful. Section 13 - The Big Picture This is section ties together all the things learned in the previous sections and uses the information to make a short animation. The short animation is the Jim rig punching a punching bag. It good to actually see all the steps come together to make something real and usable. Conclusion The DVD seems to be well thought out, and I found it useful and learned things which is always a benefit. It does in my opinion have a few problems and in some cases it would have helped to have done more narration on the theory of animation techniques (the 12 rules of animations). One other thing I did not really like is it could of added more information on how to actually create rig from the ground up. It's a shame that rig creation was not covered in any real detail, this would have made the DVD much more complete for animators. Also it is important to realize that this book seems to be aimed at the beginning animator, so if you have experience of animation you may not get much out of this book. However even if you are not new animator, if you have not used Blender before this book maybe useful in getting you up to speed quickly with Blender. Go get this book! Review Score 75% |
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Carsten Wartmann - The Blender GameKit 2nd Edition - Book and DVD Review Well I finally managed to work my way through "The Blender GameKit 2nd Edition".
"The Blender GameKit 2nd Edition" is a Blender Foundation book meaning that a certain percentage of the price of the book go towards the funding of the Blender Foundation and the development of Blender. When I heard that it was coming out I wandered on over to the Blender E-Shop and pre-ordered my copy. On November 11 the book cost 31.20 euros before postage and tax. As I mentioned the 2nd edition of this book really filled a need as Blender 2.48's Game Engine has advanced significantly in terms of new features and capabilities. The book is split into several different categories, listed below:
After the introductory section the book moves on to the tutorial sections. With each tutorial section covering the more and more difficult aspects of Blender Game Engine. I found the Beginner's Tutorials section very useful and informative and I would think that a lot of people who have never used the Blender;s Game Engine before will get a good grounding on how it can be used with just its graphical user interface. This section really does help to show how easy the BGE can be to use and do some very useful things. In the course of doing the Beginner's Tutorials a few simple mini games are created to demonstrate the various features of BGE. The Intermediate Tutorials section goes through some of the steps required to make a couple more games with slightly more complexity. There is where I started to notice problems with the book, the first and most serious one being that one of the tutorials files (the subracer ones) were missing from the DVD, which was a problem as the book used these files to teach various concepts. On the upside the Blender GameKit website quickly fixed this by adding the tutorial files to the erratum website. So you can now get those files from there. These were not the only missing files from the DVD but they were the most important. The other less important issue that I noticed while reading throughout the entire book was a lack of good proof reading, the book is littered with typographical errors and strange fonts and missing spaces. On the whole though these lesser glitches don't really affect the usefulness of the book. Another slightly more serious issue with the Intermediate Tutorial section was that it started to assume more and more knowledge of Blender outside of its Blender Game Engine features, such a knowing how to use python and knowing how to do more advanced modelling tasks. This would be fine but the book does not make any serious attempt to teach python programming or character animation. As such other books will be needed to cover these topic and that is not really made clear in these sections. If you don't know python or have not read some Blender character animation books, you may well start to get a bit confused. My own personal opinion is that really the book should of taken it much slower and gone through more of the basics before moving on to more involved topics. Other people may be fine with the speed it moves at, but I would of preferred more detail and slower pace. I was left with the feeling that the intermediate section was more of a "this is what can be done with a bit more effort now go look at the files and figure it out for yourself", which I don't think was very helpful. It really was too brief to me useful. The same problems apply with the Advanced and Apricot sections, though at least with the Apricot section its hardly surprising as the Apricot game was very complex and very powerful, you would need several books just on the Apricot to make a dent on all the things it can do. If you are an advanced Blender user or you know your way around Python, you will no doubt find the section useful but otherwise I'm not to sure. Next is the Reference section which in my opinion is one of the best sections of the entire book along with the Introductory section and the Beginner's Tutorials. A lot of the questions which are left hanging in earlier parts of the Book are answered in the reference section. It is a shame however that this is not explained earlier in the book. Which means that for the earlier parts of the book you are often left with no clear idea of what things mean until you have worked your way to the reference section and things become clearer. An example of this, at one point in the book there is a tutorial which makes a mini game called Tube Cleaner and in that game is a special texture which keep track of score which the book mentions, but not until the reference section is it explained how this is done. And annoyingly the link which is printed in the book to give a full explanation of how to make full use of this feature is out of date (but the erratum page will be updated with a valid link explaining this). It probably seems from this review that this book is not very good, this would not be true, with just the Introductory section, Beginners Tutorial section and the Reference section the Blender GameKit 2nd Edition will be very useful to both the Beginning Blender Game Engine user and the more advanced user. It is just a shame that the other sections seem to assume too much on the part of the reader. I definitely think the book does suffer for not having a dedicated section on teaching basic python and then extending that on to how to use it for the Blender Game Engine environment. I know printed pages are expensive and having extra pages puts the price of the book up, but I think the book would of benefited. On the positive side, all the pictures and screenshots in the book were in colour which made them very useful. The Blender books certainly seem to understand the important of colour in pictures. With this book and "www.cartoonsmart.com - logic bricks tutorial video", I think there are going to be a lot more people using the Blender Game Engine for many interesting things. Review Score 70% |
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Roland D. Hess - Animating with Blender - Book and DVD
I wasn't surprised for a couple of reasons, the first being that every review I have seen raves about the book (ya those that get to read faster than me got the opinions out quicker (damn them)! The second reason that I knew that it would be good was because of the books author, one Roland Hess. Roland has produced 1 other book that I know of called "Essential Blender", and that was excellent (and every Blender user should also have that book). Unlike "Essential Blender" (which was a beginners book), "Animating with Blender" is not targeted towards beginners and as such it doesn't go into some of the basics of how to use Blender, this not to say however that a beginning Blender user won't find "Animating with Blender" useful they will. The name of the book is however slightly misleading in that it really should be called "Short Film Creation with Blender", but I admit that doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. So if you are looking for a book that teaches you how to do animation with topics such as rigging, walk cycles and the like this book won't be much use to you. In that case you maybe need Tony Mullen's book on animation (Introducing Character Animation with Blender). "Animating with Blender" is more centered towards the production side of creating short animations which then can be used as short features. As such, areas such as the various stages of organising and producing a short animated feature film are described and linked to the various features within the Blender environment. A large amount of time is devoted to not only explaing how to do production tasks but also why you would want to do them in the first place. To me at least it seemed like a very complete book, I especially liked the guidance on how to organised larger projects and how to save system resources by using various tricks and tips involving the node editor. Coverage of render farm setup was also very good and made a sometimes complicated topic fairly easy (for me at least) to understand. If you are a Blender user looking for advice on how to make a short (or even a large) animation feature within Blender I think this book will definitely be an asset. The only real gripe I have with the book is not the books fault at all, but I could not purchase the book from the Blender e-shop. It would have been nice to be able to buy the book from the Blender Foundation shop so as to donate a little of the price towards Blender development. But that is not the publishers fault. The Blender e-shop really needs to be more on the ball about getting Blender related books into their shop, much more quickly, so we can order from them and not from amazon. As mentioned above I purchased the book from Amazon. I can't remember the price I paid for it but it can currently be had for £16.46 in the United Kingdom. It has roughly 350 pages worth of useful information and very helpfully the pictures are printed in colour (which is a big plus). It's published by "Focal Press", I had not heard of this publisher before but if they keep publishing good Blender books like this one I think I am going to have to keep a eye on them. All in all excellent book, well produced and very clear to understand and follow. I won't give it a review score because really I don't make animated features, but people who do will be best suited to do that. But I can say that it is a very good book and I found it informative. No brainer if you're a Blender user go and get this book! |
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Kernon Dillon - BlenderNewbies - Tutorial Compilation DVD - Training DVD Review
Recently they released a Tutorial compilation DVD with most of the tutorials included on the DVD, as well as extra materials and higher quality video. When I found out about the DVD I navigated over to the BlenderNewbies website and decided to order the DVD. Ordering the DVD was very easy as PayPal support was one of the payment options, which made things quick and efficient. The DVD cost $35 dollars, which to me seems reasonable given that there are 14 hours of video tutorials. Once I had placed my order I waited for it to arrive. About a week after I ordered the DVD, I was sent an email informing me that there was going to be a slight delay in sending my order because an extra CD-R disc was being included with extra material on it. Thoughtfully I was given the option of choosing weather to wait longer for the extra CD-R content or not waiting and just receiving the original DVD. I chose to wait for the extra CD-R. When the ordered package had arrived I inspected its contents and found it to be very well packaged. The contents of the package are listed below:
The 2 most important items obviously are the DVD and CD-R and both of these are very well made and produced. Both played very reliably in my laptop and desktop machine. The DVD disc was housed in a very solid DVD case and was shrink wrapped. I worked my way through the 14 hours of video material on the DVD and this alone was worth the price. Also on the DVD was extra bonus material and a snapshot copy of the Blender wiki. The disc based copy of the wiki seems to be fairly recent as some of the documents and alterations I made to the online wiki are also on this DVD based version (can also be viewed online at wiki.blender.org). Very useful. The quality of the videos on the DVD were of very high quality as promised and in some cases much, much clearer than the online versions. Well worth having. If there is one criticism of the tutorials DVD for me it would be that the Old Country Pathway tutorial video is still after all this time incomplete and it would have made a lot of sense to complete the tutorial before releasing the DVD. The bonus CD-R was filled with some extra time lapse videos and Blender files. Although these time lapse videos were fun to watch it's not clear to me what educational use they are. I did enjoy watching the piggy bank video time lapse, and the CD-R was free so I can't really complain. Though I think it would he been useful to have more spoken tutorials instead. All in all an excellent resource with good videos, blend files and wiki snapshot. Review Score 85% |
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