I just wanted folks to know that there’s been a slight change in plans regarding the release of my new book Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D. I think this should come as welcome news to people who are itching to read the book. The original plan was to release the book to correspond to the 2.5 release of Blender. As most of you know, this may be a while off yet. Fortunately, the developers have made the decision to release all of the new features together in a stable release as 2.46. This is great news for the book, because it means that there will soon be an official release that contains all the functionality I’ve been writing about: the new particle system and hair, caching, cloth, updated soft bodies, et cetera.
Just yesterday I submitted the draft for the last chapter. It’ll now go through the editing process, then I’ll make revisions and re-check all the chapters for consistency with the release. Hopefully the book will be ready to hit the shelves as soon as possible after 2.46 comes out (the version of Blender will accompany the book on a CD).
In the meantime, in case anybody hasn’t seen the teaser video (it was on BlenderNation a few weeks ago) you can check that out here:
For those who haven’t already heard about this, the book will cover all aspects of Blender’s physical simulation functionality in depth, including particles (dynamic and hair), fluid, soft bodies, cloth, rigid bodies using the BGE and Bullet Physics, simulation of plants and trees, and many other topics. There’s tons of information about using such things as modifiers, textures, and materials (including nodes), and even a little bit about PyDrivers. The book will be in full color and I think it is definitely going to look terrific.
It’s available for pre-order at Amazon now (see the link in my sig). As you can see on the Amazon page, it is currently set for official release by June, but this is just an estimate and depends on several factors. I’m hoping it can be out sooner.
Look forward to it! Will the book be available for pre-order in the Blender e-shop, you think?
I really don’t know. That’s basically between Ton and the publisher. Ton is aware that the book is coming out, and I think it basically just comes down to whether it makes economic sense for the e-Shop to stock it. The book is published in America, so there’s a cost to importing it to Europe, etc. It would be nice if it did work out in the BF’s favor to carry the book, but at the moment I don’t know if or when they will decide to carry it.
It had to be difficult to be catching up all new stuff in SVN as well as dozen new features added continuously (cloth, etc.).
Indeed it has been keeping me on my toes. I had a whole section written on using soft bodies for cloth (before I knew whether the actual Cloth modifier would make it into the release…) and Genscher got the Cloth in just at the last moment before the feature freeze! I managed to completely re-work that section to get it updated with the new Cloth modifier. I still have to go over the whole book again to make sure the screen shots show the latest panels and the methods are all fully up to speed. So yeah, I’ve been working like a dog to stay on top of the features. I can see why books usually correspond to a slightly older version, but in this case that wasn’t really an option, since things like particles and cloth are so central to the topic of the book.
I guess you already know this thread but anyway you may be interested in these great tutorials of CoyHot - fire, paintFX, … (see also his website)
Wow, actually I saw the first few posts of that thread, but then I’d ignored the rest… I missed all the interesting bits! Thanks for pointing this out!