What are the best books on the market right now or upcoming for Blender 2.5+ ? I have seen a couple but I’m also wondering, why are all of them in black and white? I guess it is of course cheaper on production costs, but shouldn’t a book on materials and textures have some colors to show what is being expressed through those textures? I may be wrong in this thinking, but I really love looking at purty colors. 
Jeremy Deighan
Beginning Blender 
Ooooo that looks like a good one. I guess it’s a difficult market to supply books for a program that is constantly changing and still in beta form. Got any other gold nuggets that you know about?
Blender Foundations!
And here is the base page for the extensive review I’m doing of it, so you can have some idea of what to expect:
Have fun!
2.6… such a dumb name for a book…
Considering that 2.6 will be a whole new bike.
The GUI will change.
Which might be an issue and that would make it obvious that the book lies about the version they are using.
Not to mention that cycles may or may not be somewhere in the late 2.6 series.
So basically everything about rendering could be crossed out from that book.
“the book lies about the version they are using.”
That’s pretty unfair considering what is said in the link I provided. You’re making it sound like it’s some kind of ploy when it obviously isn’t. I’ll requote the author here for your convenience:
Let’s clear up three bits of grief first. The book cover and text reads “Blender 2.6″. Unfortunately, when the cover art was finalized and locked at the printer’s several months ago, the official (and unofficial) word was that the released version of the Blender after all of these alphas and betas would be called Blender 2.6. That has changed. We had to make a call, and we made the wrong one. So don’t be scared of the “2.6″. It’s entirely cosmetic.
In any case, considering that late 2.6 will not come earlier than a year from now (and that’s being ridiculous), not only should more up-to-date books be out by then but also any sensible person will look at the publication date for Blender Foundations (August 2010) and notice that’s pretty old for a book on ever-evolving software like Blender. I don’t doubt there will be people bitching “oh but it said 2.6 in the cover”, I’m just saying inform yourself - it’s not a lie, it has been clearly explained and if you look for it you’ll find it.
So to stay on topic: Blender Foundations is a great book at the moment, and for the moment ignore the fact that it says 2.6 on the cover. Like Roland said, “it’s entirely cosmetic”.
The link below has 3 books from Packt Publishing on 2.5.
All 3 are very good books let down by the publisher printing in greyscale. After the first one I bought the rest as ebooks.
Not sure how much life there is in the Materials and Textures book considering “Cycles”
This one is due on my doorstep on the 6th may.
This one is due on my doorstep later in May.
http://www.dummies.com/store/product/Blender-For-Dummies-2nd-Edition.productCd-0470584467.html
+1 for Beginning Blender
I guess I like books.
free you have an incredibally closed mind, espically considering the writer is one of the developers who made blender what it is today. you cant ride the coattails of someone who got you this far, jump on the bandwagon this late, and tell them they are going the wrong way. if they went the direction upi want to go you never would have been able to jump on. thats speaking of harky.
cycles is soon to be irrelivant. its safe to ignore. blender is openource and free, as in beer and speach. if blender is going to go cuda and become an nvidia product, when nvidia is dying, then good luck. ati owns the pc market, they put out superior broducts at a lower price. in the console market only last place ps3 uses nvidia chips. nintendo and xbox 360 use ati. apple uses imagination technologies. nvidia was already in 3rd place before the psn fiasco which may get sony, nvidias largest source of income. sued out of existance. cycles as a cuda program was dead before it started because cuda is dying. blender would be better off and more relivant if it went dx than cuda. go dx, let ms do most of your programming for you.
how many cg movies have made it into the top ten? how many used dx products like autodesk? how many used blender? how many used cuda? ati and ms are both becomming more opensource. nvidia is going more closed source.
free if you were half the man harky is you would be twice the man you are today. how much of blender have you written and for how long? i forgot. you cant. all you do is try to tell those who know and who do write blender that they are doing it all wrong. put up or shut up. you think cycles is the ultimate? get broken to tell you about harky. your “god” considers harky an equal.
@FreeMind do you acutally use Blender to do any work or do you just talk a lot, currently am going with talks a lot and does zero Blender work. Too many talkers not enough walkers. Harkyman explained quiet well why his book has the 2.6 in its title, is the book going to be outdated when 2.6 actually comes maybe but I will bet good money it will still be invaluable and useful.
@lynchy67 thanks for the link to packtpub I actually saw that they have a character animation book also coming out, it could go nicely with Tony’s book which I have already order he uses rigify to rig his character but this book seems to have a bit more on rigging something I want to learn.
Talking about Harkyman and the new books on character animation… his new book, on character animation (ha!), is coming out soon too: http://www.amazon.com/Tradigital-Blender-Animators-Classical-Principles/dp/0240817575/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303985443&sr=8-1
You just had to show me that, damn I am thinking if i get all those books that’s a lot of pages I am going to have to read. And the thing with technical books is you actually have to practice what you read otherwise its in through the one ear and out through the other, so it always takes longer to read them.
But this is a very good thing, when I started really learning blender in 2007 there were like two books available now you can actually make a nice little mini library.
Thanks for all the tips. I didn’t mean to start such a buzz but it’s always good to hear both sides of the coin. I believe that some things being said are kind of what I feel. If I pick up a new book today, will they change the interface tomorrow and make what I’ve learned obsolete?
I guess being in grayscale isn’t a bad thing as long as it’s referring to things not associated to needing to show color (animating, modelling, etc) but I think any book with textures and materials needs to show color for that extra emphasis. Plus I’ve had grayscale books in the past and sometimes they come out too dark or it makes other things hard to see (as if you were following grid lines but can’t see the actual lines). Thanks everyone, keep the posts coming!
Jeremy
The book that I bought the paper version of “Lighting and Rendering” from Packt Pub is actually the one that needs colour the most as it has a whole chapter on colour theory. I believe the author was also pretty disappointed in the publisher and has made all the colour pictures available on his website. I actually bought the ebook as well which is full colour.
As I have all the Packt 2.5 ebooks and the Beginning Blender books heres my views from a relative beginners point of view.
My favorite at the moment is Beginning Blender as its use of graphics linked to the settings in the blender panels is awesome. As I get more experienced I find myself digging into the other books more often to get more in depth and specific explanations, particularly with “Lighting and Rendering” and “Materials and Textures”. Not really delved into character animation yet so I won’t comment on that one although the 4 chapters currently available in the “Raw” ebook look pretty good.
That’s good stuff my friend. Though I’m still learning my way around Blender, I really want to start digging into the guts of the program. Like the texturing/rendering/animation aspect. I know it’s important to take baby steps when learning anything but I feel with doing the massive amounts of tutorials online I’ll learn all the shortcut keys and basic functions fast enough. I’m ready to start doing some real renders and animations though! haha.
I’m 50/50 on which route I’ll take but I see myself more as a modeller/animator than a texture artist. So I’ll probably end up getting something along those lines. I’ve also been checking out the blender.org dvds available and those look pretty good too.
Jeremy