🔥 It's finally out: The most comprehensive and in-depth Blender handbook ever!

[plasmasolutions]

Hey Blender peeps!

My name is Thomas Beck - some of you know me already from my Blender Developer Sneak Peek series on YouTube , from my tweets on twitter or from my Blender contributions as a Blender core dev (like the “wireframe” modifier, the “white balance” modifier for the VSE, “fonts preview” in the file browser editor, making operators work with multi object editing for 2.8, … ). I have more than 15 years of professional Blender experience as an artists, director and developer, founded a design, software development and training studio (Plasmasolutions), and I’m a father of a beautiful 2.5 year old son. Today however, I’m talking to you as an eBook author .

In the last 6 years I wrote 2 German Blender books, both super comprehensive, up-to-date and well received: the 1st book had 700 pages, was targeted at Blender 2.72 (not yet released at that time) with an Amazon rating of 4.4 / 5 , and the 2nd book 800 pages, targeted at 2.79 (also not released back then) with an Amazon rating of 4.8 / 5 .

Today, after 2 more years of translating, improving, refining and recreating countless pages and images, and based on the successful German predecessors, I’d like to present you my newest baby, a super in-depth, 917 A4 pages & 1200+ illustrations strong international version for Blender 2.79b - this time as an professionally type-set and laid out eBook: “Blender 2.7 - the comprehensive handbook”.

Have a look at https://plasmasolutions.de/the-comprehensive-handbook/?be=2 to get more info about the eBook, reading extracts, some first testimonials, an overview of all chapters and to understand why Blender 2.8 is covered in the appendix .

I wish that I can give you something with this book that I desperately missed when I started with Blender: a very comprehensive Blender guide that is not only showing you how Blender and its tools work both on the inside from a developer’s and at the surface from artist’s perspective, but also show you the real world origins of many areas that Blender touches - may it Rendering, Lighting, Animation and many more.

This post is meant to give you a heads up that the book is out there in the wild now (more specific since the first day of the amazing Blender Conference 2018) and give you the possibility to ask me anything in public that you have in mind before buying the book. On top, I’d like to have a platform for interacting with you - so I’ll use this forum for polls about further book topics.

If don’t like to share your thoughts with the world or if you’d like to ask me anything in private, write an e-mail to [email protected]. And if you already bought it (and massively improved your karma points by doing so - thanks so much ), I really can’t wait to read your feedback here or via !

Last but not least: Thank you so much for your support throughout my career. Blender and you as a community changed my life completely and I’m super grateful to be part of it .

Last last but not least: The sneak peeks will continue next week

Much love ,
Tom

[colkai]

Hope it’s a great success Thomas, certainly be placing an order once I get my pension this month.

[plasmasolutions]

Hey colkai, thanks very much! Getting all this positive feedback from my readers around the world is already a big success and relief for me, so I’m right now very happy. I really hope though that you don’t have to spend your whole pension on the book

[plasmasolutions]

Hey guys,

Black Friday starts early this year for you From today until 27th you get 20% off of my book. I’m calling it “Black Friday Week plus 2 days” & you need no voucher - it’s reduced automatically, get your copy while it’s hot

Have fun boosting your Blender knowledge!
Tom

[wolfie138]

sounds interesting but w/ 2.8 just around the corner how much of it will be outdated when that hits?

[plasmasolutions]

Hey wolfie138,

if you ask me to express it in pages I’d say about 50ish pages out of the existing 918. The Blender Internal Renderer is the biggest part of it (it’s not contained in Blender 2.8 anymore) - although funny enough, many techniques described in there are getting relevant again with Eevee - so it could be even less that will become outdated next year!

By covering Filmic, PBR, HDR Lighting and many other advanced topics, you’ll transform your knowledge very easily to 2.8 when it’s out in March. Btw.: Many bigger studios that use Blender won’t switch to 2.8 in March, they’ll wait for 2.82 as it will be much more feature complete than the first shot (and as pipeline devs have to adapt their environment to the new version first.

And - just saying as I know this questions comes up very often - there will be significant discounts for existing readers once the 2.8 book comes out.

If there are more questions, just ask - I’m glad to answer them all!

[ouraf]

I’ll wait because i want to see the chapter about EEvEE (there are some nodes i’m curious about, like NPR and convert to rgb).

That being said, do you sell the book with prices adapted for currency different than euros (the exchange rate makes it very expensive to purchase where i live)

[plasmasolutions]

Hi @ouraf, that’s perfectly fine, just do as you wish! Note though, that it will be an Eevee primer, which won’t therefore be as extensive as a “real” 2.8 book (which I’ll create at the end of next year [significant discounts apply for existing readers]).

Re currency: Generally not, but I’m the last one who would say no to a kind question via pm (and always remember that my Twitter followers get another 5% as well)

That said, I plan to have a Christmas special from Thursday to Thursday with 25% off! If you or anyone would like to benefit of the discount early, just pm me as well!

Cheers,
Tom

[plasmasolutions]

Hi Guys,

just a short heads up: I just started my Christmas Special : My book is 33 % off the normal price for one week, starting now!

Apart from that, I just updated it to version 1.0.4 - which means two more pages about Baking / Caching in the particle simulation realm and over 50 typos erased & grammar refined.

The next update (Januar 2018) will contain everything you need to know about how to get your bug reported properly & how to reach out to us (devs) and I’ll shed light on the development phases of Blender…

I wish you Merry Christmas , much and an awesome Christmas 2018!

Happy Blending,
Tom