Learning Blender 2.6 from books for 2.49/2.5

Support Basics & Interface
#1

I used to play around with modelling back in the Amiga days and I’ve been interested in checking out Blender for a while now.

At the moment Packt Publishing are running a promotion on ebooks (£3 each!! Until Jan 4th, midnight GMT) and this seemed like a good opportunity to finally dive in, but I’m concerned that many of their books are for version 2.49 and 2.5.

  • Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery
  • Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

I’m interested in these books as much for helping me around the Blender UI as learning modelling/texturing skills.

Does anyone know if I’d suffer greatly from buying either of these two books or should I only be looking at books published 2012 onwards?

Thanks for your help.

#2

Forget anything for blender 2.49. Anything for blender 2.5 will still be relevant for blender 2.6 but will miss out vast swathes of important things that have come our recently such as the camera/object tracking. The mesh system has changed to allow ngons so the tools in 2.5 may not be the best way of modelling now. The materials book will only cover the materials for blender internal renderer which is fine but will have nothing applicable for the materials used in the cycles renderer.

To be honest there is sufficient info on line rather than in books.

#3

I know there’s plenty of information online but I find books very useful for new ventures as they tend to lead you from A to Z in an orderly fashion - crawling the web can be far too time-wasting when you don’t know what you’re doing :slight_smile:

Thanks for the help Richard.

#4

I appreciate both online and book resources. As Richard mentions, Blender is rapidly developing this days and you’ll find no books on the latest features. Check out Blender Basics 4th Edition. It’s available as a free .PDF download and the material and exercises are relatively current to Blender 2.6x.
http://www.cdschools.org/site/Default.aspx?PageID=455
http://www.cdschools.org/Page/450

#5

Silver? Turbo Silver? Sculpt-Animate 4D? DBW Render?

Just curious. I cut my teeth on DBW Render before buying into Eric Graham’s 3D universe. Loved every minute of it!

#6

I agree, online resources are great, but as a self taught programmer I’ve learned that until you know what you’re looking for…

Many thanks for the PDF link, I’m downloading now.

@rontarrant, I wasn’t such a good boy back in those days when it came to the software I used and Imagine I shouldn’t shout about stuff I didn’t pay for :wink: I really did only dabble though, as I never really had the patience to wait 3 days for an image to render! :smiley: