As you might already know I’m using Blender 3D for creating the artwork of my games. It’s a free 3D modeling tool with a lot of features and possibilities. A few weeks ago I received a request from Packt Publishing to review a new book that teaches you how to work with Blender 3D. It’s called ‘Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines‘, written by author Allan Brito. Since I’m going to model some machines myself, I thought it might be interesting to see what this book has to offer.
The book is aimed at a beginning to intermediate Blender user. If you know a bit about the Blender interface, you will definitely have no trouble reading and understanding this book.
The contents of the book is mainly split up into 3 sections, and each covers a project from start to finish. In these projects you will create a futuristic handgun, a steam punk spacecraft and a transforming robot. With each project the learning curve increases, so it starts off pretty easy but builds up from there. I really like the hands-on approach of this book, which makes sure you will not get bored with too much theoretical stuff.
For an intermediate reader like me the book has some cool things to offer, like the modeling of rotating cables and wires, and the use of external renders like YafaRay and LuxRender. It’s clear from the book that they have a lot extra to offer, so I’m definitely going to check them out.
One negative part is that the book doesn’t contain color images, and as far as I can see the images in the ebook also are in gray-tone. This is pretty unfortunate since you’re not able to see the true end result of each project. The Packt Publishing website offers a download of the book’s supporting materials, so if you want you can still play with the end results and see how cool they really look.
To whet your appetite a bit, here’s a video of the last project showing the lighting setup in LuxRender:
If you’re interested, definitely check out the book at the Packt Publishing website. They even offer a sample chapter that you can download for free.
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