Blender Basics Classroom Tutorial Book - 4th Edition

Inhoud

Blender can be a difficult program to learn with limitless possibilities. What do you teach in the time you have to teach? That’s a tough question because you can’t teach it all.
This tutorial book is designed to get you up and running in the basics of creating objects and scenes and animating. The best advice I can give you about learning this program is Don’t Give Up! Any rendering and animation program has a tough learning curve and Blender is no exception. After a few weeks, things get easier. This tutorial has been developed to be used in conjunction with daily lesson planning and demonstrations.
Because of this, some areas of Blender have not been described as fully as they could be. If you are using this guide as a stand-alone teaching or “self-help” tool, you may need to seek additional help from reputable places like www.blender.org and www.blenderartists.org to make sense of things. These sites give you access to help forums and tutorials. There are literally thousands of Blender users world-wide that browse the forums to give and get advice. Make use of that vast knowledge base!

Version Information:
The current release at the time of this printing is version 2.5x. Since Blender is developed by a worldwide pool of individuals giving freely of their time, releases can happen in as little as 4 months and as much as 1 year. Because of such a large number of individuals contributing to Blender, major changes can occur between releases showing substantial improvements. Version 2.5 is a drastic move from past versions of Blender!
The interface has changed in an effort to improve the work flow and make it more comparable to other programs.

Bespreking

The best way to learn Blender

Blender is a huge 3D-design software package and that has certainly one big downside: it requires a lot of time to get the hang of it. Because of its size it becomes quite a challenge to choose where to start. Do I first need to become an expert at all the nuts and bolts of modeling and then advance to materials and lighting, or do I first try to taste a bit over every part of the design cycle. That last option seems to be the best one, but it gets you quickly entangled into the web of many things you “still need to look at”.

To avoid getting lost in all the terminology and complexity the Blender Basics Classroom Tutorial Book is a great option. It does not only guide you through every module of the Blender software, but also offers plenty of great tutorials that bring you quickly up to speed with all the theory. But do not call this a beginners guide solely, because it is much more. It succeeds in firing up your enthusiasm for the program and before you know it you will start diving into the more advanced topics for which many tutorials are available on the web.

If I would like to introduce someone to Blender, I would certainly advice to have a look at this ‘free’ ebook.