Blender For Dummies®

Introduction

Blender: an awesome little 3D content creation suite that animates characters, surprises nay-sayers, simulates physics, and gives you foot massages if you've had a bad day! Okay, the last part is an exaggeration, but it's difficult to imagine a task in computer animation that Blender can't do. With it, you can create 3D models, animate those models, edit those animations into a movie, and even create video games with them. All this in a free program that's as small as a 9 MB download. Crazy!

Blender sits at a very unique position in the world of 3D computer graphics. It used to be that to get into 3D modeling and animation, you only had a few options and most of them were too expensive, too limiting, or – ahem – too illegal for people just trying to see what this whole 3D thing was all about. Blender circumvents all of that because it's free. And it's not just free as in, "This costs me zero dollars." It's truly free software that a world full of developers and users constantly contribute to, enhancing and improving it at a mind-boggling pace.

Of course, 3D computer graphics is a complex topic and all software of this type is dense with buttons, options, settings, and unique ways of working. Perhaps more than any other program like it, Blender carries a pretty heavy reputation for being difficult to understand. It's not typically viewed as software for beginners. But, if I've done my job right, this book will help simplify things. Blender For Dummies is not just a book ...