next blender book

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

hi

one of my older professors asked me about to by a blender book.

however i only posses the very old one, cool design.

i never read the other once and with blenders releases lately it
seems to be outdated.

is there a new printed version which also takes the nodes into account
in the works?

claas

2

Tony Mullen’s book is coming out next March but I’m not sure if it will deal with nodes…:confused:

3

If you are refering to a new official manual, no word yet on when one will be done. We are aware of the need for a new manual, but it takes quite a bit to get one put together, edited, published, etc.

LetterRip

4

Why not introduce your professor to the Blender online manual?

That’s the most up to date book isn’t it?

Even though it is not complete, it has a lot of information in itself already.

Saves your professor money if he/she reads off the internet.

5

Hi Letter

well I know how much that takes, I did quite some book design.
I was just curious because of how fast Blender evolves.

Well my former prof rather wants to focus on modeling only anyway
and rendering his metal objects. no animation.

Tom has the money to buy it :wink: also that will give blender some money
and also he prefers to have a printed manual next to him!

6

The most up-to-date blender informational source is certainly the wiki. If Blender were to have hardcover manuals, we would need a new release every two weeks…

Blenderwiki + Google + Blenderartists.org + CVS Commit logs = 99% of Blender knownledge in exsistence

7

Well, he could just print out the online Blender manual and file it coudln’t he?

It would cost the Blender foudnation a lot of money to print new books when the users are already learning Blender online anyways.

I’m not saying Tom (I’m assuming that’s the name of your professor) doesn’t have money to buy the book but just imagine how many people would buy the book rather than getting the same information from the web.

As well as what mpan3 has mentioned about printing new books every time new information comes out.

8

Last year on the Blender Conference, there were ideas not to redo the complete book again, but update it. This would be done by little books (size depends on what to update and what blender version) that covers the new features and changes instead of everything redoing again, like modeling a model or use ipo’s and stuff.

This way you buy updates instead of every time again a complete book were you know already 50% how to do it. Sounds intresting but I’m not sure if this is still going to continue since I never heard from it again.

Also I thought there were ideas to make certain parts of blender covert in different books, like a book for: modeling, rendering/lightning, texturing/materials and animations. So you buy a book in what section you’re intrested and want to know more about.

That’s what I had heard, not 100% sure if this is going to be continued, but I think it would be a nice idea.

9

That makes more sense than covering hundreds of Blender features in one book. I’d like to have a book that covers everything about applying materials and textures, for instance.

On modeling, well, I’ve learned enough about it by trial and experimentation. A lot of times by accident such as following a tutorial. Took me months to discover lots of modeling features I never knew existed. So, it would be a good idea to come up a book that covers only modeling.

10

Yup, a new, all-encompassing Blender Book including a Reference manual is probably a thing of the past. It’ll take so long to compile that Blender will be several versions further than whatever the book is based on. A series of about 5-7 small books about the size of the old Tutorial Guides would probably be easier to handle both from a production standpoint (ie they don’t need all to appear at once as from a shelf-life perspective. (ie a major upgrade to one part of Blender will not impact the content of the other books). Support problems surrounding the books would probably be hard (how many to print of each book? At what point do we get a new version of a book? How to split up Blender in different books?..)

Now, me personaly, I would be interested in for instance
Blender basic modeling (Blender intro, poly, metaball, Nurbs, SubSurf, Sculpt,…)
Blender Animation (Keyframing, IPOs, armature, cyclic animation, camera flythru’s etc)
Blender Character modelling and animation.
Blender Materials and lightning with Blender Internal.
Blender Physical effects (Softbody, Rigid body, Fluids, Particles,…)
Blender and external renderers (Yafray and whatever else is feasible. Indigo? PovRay? Sunflow? Kerkythea? Renderman? Mental Ray?)

But then of course you’d get:
What about Gameblender? Python scripting? Blender for making movies (compositing, sound, codecs, NLE,…), Coding for Blender etc, etc

One would probably end up with either too many booklets or with the original problem (books covering so much that a lot is obsolete before long)

The easiest way to deal with these problems would possibly be to distribute only SoftCopy (PDF on CD or so) but this opens a whole different can of worms with copyright violation, DRM etc.

Ah well, I guess I’ll just have to look and see what comes about (Bugman_2000’s book should be interesting.) Who knows, maybe other proffesional technical writers will be enticed to do a book on Blender or one of its subdomains …

11

Maybe the Blender Foundation should also put out some books about general
CG topics?

Most of the stuff is Blender specific.

(Not that that’s bad ;))

12

I like to see an official Loose-Leaf manual. More expensive to buy, I suppose, but updating would be a snap. By the time ten years went by, every page might have been updated at least once, and the cover would probably have been replaced once, but it would still be the same book!

Probably several volumes would make it handier.

1 Like
13

Blendernation.com headlines “New Japanese Blender Book Released.”

It’s titled, “Blender Beginner’s Bible.” I wonder what the term newbie is in Japanese.:smiley:

It must have taken the author more than a year to finish it. Now, I’m thinking of writing one on modeling in Blender, for newbies, of course.:smiley:

14

In English? :confused: :smiley:

15

The Japanese title?

“Boolendor”

:slight_smile: no only joking.

You know what happens when the Japanese do art - you get stuff like Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. :smiley:

16

‘Newbie’ or ‘beginner’ in japanese is “biginaa” or “kakedashi” according to this site. :smiley:

17

That’s formally “syoshinshya”, informally “kakedashi” “hiyotsuko” or “shirouto”.

18

mh … good points.