anybody maybe read this book?
I am curious about the depths of it since I am not new to Blender
and found most other books published for Blender targeting new
users.
If you write a book on Blender, the Publisher often gets at least one complete newbie (never used the program before) as a critical editor with a lot of say on what whether your writing is up to scratch. This forces you to start from the interface, explain things over and over at their whim, etc. A few books which have avoided this introduction-for-beginners approach have typically been reprimanded in reviews. Add to this the pressure publishers expect (when I wrote Beginning Blender, the schedule I was given after I indicated interest was to write a chapter every 10 days… and I was full time teaching as my day job) and there’s bound to be a lot of advanced bits and pieces the author just has to cut at the end because they would take too long to write succinctly.
P.S. I am seriously thinking of buying that texturing book.
I recently discussed with someone the plateau you hit, where you’re good enough at software that it’s not worth reading a whole book to find the single hotkey you don’t know. As a result, you never learn that last hotkey.
Quick pitch: a program that includes a recording macro that’s seeing what tasks you perform. Thus, eventually it figures out the one action you perform all the time, but don’t know the hotkey for. Then it lets you know the hotkey in its startup tool tip! Hence, a solution for the experts, instead of the newcomers.
Hi Lancer
well I am not saying that the books are too basic - I simply feel that most books on the market address a certain type
of user which I am not. I can also see that addressing the most common customer makes sense in terms of marketing and sales.
Personally I am just only looking for advanced material for myself.
Interesting insight into the time line expectation. This somewhat explains why some books seem to rush too much instead
of focusing on details and depth. I totally assumed that you as an author can have more control over the depth.
i just bought it.
it’s what the title says: just a cookbook, no noob introduction to blender. a coverpage, something about the author, ToC, preface…the rest is just about how to achieve certain materials.
usually i’m sceptical when books are released before the software is finished. but this one’s a raw book, meaning it’s almost done, and you’ll receive updates as soon as they change something. i also see the advantage of submitting feedback before the book is done, plus the price (for the digital version only) isn’t too high imho. some time ago i read some how-tos on the authors blog/website and they really taught me something, that’s why i bought it.
i haven’t jumped into the details, but i will do so within the next weeks.
hth
Hi atti
thx for the info, so it is a book targeting the medium level?
Out of curiosity ebooks are plain PDFs?
yes, i’d say it’s mid-level.
ebooks could be many formats, but this one’s a PDF. it’s just 15MB though, so the pictures aren’t very highres and highly compressed.
ah ok then - looks like a possible purchase for me
I was chatting with the author on #blendercoders- Apparently the new bump code was incompatible with his book and it caused him some panic when he had a deadline the same day. 
That’s why the new-new bump code was removed, it didn’t work well with procedurals.
that’s kind of sad.
alpha and beta software is NOT finished and shouldn’t be used for production or writing a book about. lots of blender users ignore that and because of this ignoring the newer/better bump map was …well… bumped?
imho a bad development, but i have faith in ton that everythings gonna be alright 
uhm I bought the book but it looks like wasted money …
maybe more depths is coming but I am not really impressed.
uhm I bought the book and looked into it but started to get a little bit concerned
about the money I spent.
Cekuhnen : What exactly about the book makes you regret your purchase? I was thinking of getting it myself.
I have the impression the book tries to cover a lot and thus
makes cut in depths. For example you have rather very basic
materials but also cloud and fire system, but does not go into
detail with them.
Hi all,
Yes the book is aimed at the intermediate user of Blender 2.5. Although the keen beginner should be able to get through and learn a great deal about approaches to material design in Blender.
Reference the changes in Bump unfortunately the new bump code was introduced a bit too quick but following discussion with the coder and Ton the compatibility of previous to new should now be resolved and give very similar results. Unfortunately at the time it was totally different settings required to produce decent results in Blender 2.5 Procedural textures.
The book is not just a series of separate recipes. You will find a huge amount of detailed discussion on why techniques work and how they can be applied in your own Blender material and textures creations. And yes it does move from simple to complex examples to help stretch ones understanding of using these complex tools.
The RAW stage of publication is almost complete and I am grateful for the assistance of those early readers to help identify some of the issues such as normal mapping, that identified bugs in Blender. I am literally agreeing the prefinal chapters today ready for Packt to send to the printers. I believe the print publication date is 30th January.
Colin Litster (Cog)
www.cogfilms.com
The new new bump worked better in certain situations, but really ruined procedural texture bumpmaps, also there were issues with scale. It was decided that the new new bump should be removed because it pretty much broke all blend files with bump, so it wasn’t necessarily “Better”. It was taken out for a good reason.
Hi Colin
I will look into it again when it is complete.
It has some interesting aspects and tips but I still feel
depth is sometimes really only what lacks - but that is
based on what I am looking for.
@dsavi:
that clears out some things, thanks!
@cekuhnen:
sry to hear you don’t like it. lookin’ forward for you final opinion.
Na no hard feeling towards Colin.
I assume as a writer you cannot be 100% your own boss
and well everybody has different levels and thus is interested
in different areas more or less.
No book can satisfy that - it is just always hard to guess the
depth of a book without reading it and only knowing the title.
It is still a nice read.
When he talkes about the water splashing against the stones
I would be interested in well using the particle system to
perfecting this visual special effect.
When he burns through the paper the thing adding the particle
system to finish it.
But then this all might be beyond the scope of the book.
cekuhnen, thanks for the review.