Luckily, my younger brother pre-ordered this for me for my birthday (which came months ago), because the book is now sold out. Ever since I heard about it in Oct 2006, I couldn’t wait for it to come out. There are really great tutorials online, but I needed a nice coherent, beginning to end book to guide me through the process at least once. As you know, I’ve already done one animated short, “Penguin Flight“, and a few quick animated scenes in preparation for my next animated short, “Budgies“. However, although I have the basic techniques down, I know there are enough gaps in my knowledge to make any reasonably length animation a pain in the butt.

So I am going through this book, and boy is it awesome! (You can get it on amazon here) It also comes with a DVD which includes installers for all 3 major operating systems, the project files used in the book, and a bunch of sample movies – giving you an idea of what you can aspire to with Blender. The first part, where we model the character, isn’t too new for me. I already learned most of these techniques while making my shorts. However, I did learn how to use an image to model off of, as well as the advantages to doing so. The book has the user create Captain Blender. I have a feeling there will be a ton of Captain Blenders floating around the net if people decide to post their versions of the character.

If you think you’ll want to do some computer animation with blender, this is definitely the book to pick up.