Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

How This Book Is Organized

The book's chapters are grouped into relatively cohesive sections called parts. Like the chapters, each part is meant to be modular and stand on its own, but is also structured in such a way that each one adds to the next. The following sections describe the content of each part.

Part I: Wrapping Your Brain Around Blender

Not only is Blender complex, but it also has some pretty unique ways of approaching the problem of creating in three dimensions. This part is dedicated to melding your mind with the Blender way of thinking. If you've ever started up Blender and wondered, “Why in the world is it doing things this way?!,” this part is well worth the read.

Part II: Creating Detailed 3D Scenes

Each chapter in this part is dedicated to getting your work to look good, focusing on the skills of modeling, adding materials, and lighting your scenes. The techniques here are geared primarily toward creating static images, but nearly all of it is also relevant to getting animations to communicate clearly and be believable (not to mention, totally sweet to look at).

Part III: Get Animated!

Motion! Motion! Motion! Very few things in the world compare to the excellent feeling of bringing an inanimate object to life. It's hard work and can be very time consuming, but the payoff of seeing a character move and watching people react to it is worth every little bit of toil you put into it. This part shows you the basics of rigging and animating and touches on getting Blender ...