I Love This Book!!! It Saved Me Tons of Time!!!! - Blender 3D by Example

This book is amazing! I've read a few other Blender books and they all incorporate similar features. But this book goes a step further and teaches you animation, modeling, rigging, texturing, sculpting, lighting, particles, fur, grass, trees, rocks, character design, compositing, shape keys for your rig, and all the rest of the tools blender offers in such a way that it also adds principles of good techniques. For instance, you'll learn traditional principles of animation, how to write a script for your fully animated scene, what story boarding is and how to create them, and using the video sequence editor to complete the full animation of your sequences. There is an amazing amount of great information within these pages. You will learn very useful and current techniques on how to create a 3D animated sequence from scratch. I wish I had this book a few years ago.

I am a mobile game developer (and a bunch of other things), and I often need 3D objects for my games. This book has given me the knowledge that I was looking for to create assets for my games. Sure it doesn't go into things like exporting for games, but it does discuss things like creating a re-topology of a high resolution model and correct UV mapping. Tons of other things too that help me inadvertently. I still needed things like creating an animated short and still images, so this is perfect.

This really is your one stop shop for using blender if you are new to the blender world, and even a good reference book if you are familiar with blender already. Sure there will be more advanced feature that you'll need to learn that this book does not have, but the fact that this book even goes into subsurface scattering (SSS) in advanced textures and how to create grass and fur, tells you that this is not just a simple beginner's book, you'll learn it all including adjusting the cycles renderer to make great films. I'm so glad I read this book, and so will you.