I was just wondering what version of Blender this will be for…is this based on the CVS builds so that it will be at least somewhat current by the time it arrives, or will it already be out of date?
Not that that will make it useless, depends on how many new features are going to be in 2.43…but since they’re already having the splash screen contest, it looks like 2.43 is only a month or two away or so. [Relatively speaking ;)]
I was just wondering…since I haven’t seen anything anywhere saying what version it will be for.
Like Akkana Peck’s Beginning Gimp, from Novice to Professional is based on CVS versions of 2.4 I think. Or something like that.
Not that it won’t be a valuable resource either way.
Speaking as someone who’s already seen 90% of the book and who is a dev (though not active atm), I can tell you that it will most certainly NOT be outdated by the next release, nor by any release in the foreseeable future. The only significant change in character animation in the next release is the new method of stride creation, and Intro to Character Animation does not rely on the stride bone feature as it now exists.
as it were, it is unlikely that this book would go "outdated’ in one go; there maybe small differences, gradual improvements, so it would be a slow and gradual process- plus a lot of the stuff is relevant “basics” so it would continue to be useful for a while
Hey Cheese! The neat thing about Blender is that it is totally backward compatible. So, anything you learn to do a certain way is NEVER outdated. Like Materials; you can still do Materials the old way and it works fine; you dont HAVE to use nodes. And compositing too, for that matter. New features give you new options, but almost always build on some concept or way of doing things. For example, the Gus anim tut still holds water.
Personally I’m hoping the book teaches a certain amount of general principles (ie the stuff that doesn’t change), and then how to apply them in Blender.
The one thing I learnt from trying character animation is how hard it is to do well.
@Kid Tripod: I’m not sure if the book covers the principles of animation, but I’m guessing you can look that up on Amazon.com. If you want to learn the principles and mechanics of good animation, though, I’d be happy to PM you a list of resources that have helped me. I think there’s also a document from the BSoD project coming that’s focused on the principles of animation and how they apply to Blender.
I agree with slikdigit that even if Blender advances far beyond the scope of this book, the basic information will probably still be useful.
I’m looking forward to seeing it published!
Clean3d
[edit] Actually, I’ll just put the links to those resources in one of the animation stickies in the near future. Sorry if I went kind of off-topic there…[/edit]
