Written by Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery: Create photorealistic 3D architectural visualizations of buildings, interiors, and environmental scenery
This book is about creating realistic models of building exteriors and interiors, and surrounding environment and scenery. This book is for architects, game designers, artists, or movie makers who want to create realistic buildings, interiors, and scenery using Blender 3D, a free, open-source graphics tool. This book is not a general introduction to Blender, but focuses on developing expertise on the architectural aspects of the tool. Readers need not have prior knowledge of Blender.
List Price: $ 44.99
Price: $ 40.90
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Disappointed,
Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery
Compared with a other Blender books in this price range the book performs rather poorly: the images are only BW and it has NO CODE associated with it (though the announcement on Amazon says so)- neither .blend nor .py files and the book’s download page offers only a .zip files with a color version of the images for which you have to hand out your E-mail address ….
The level of expertise is for beginners; it gives a short introduction to Blender’s interface which is too short for newbies and unnecessary for the more exprienced user.
Then it details the steps to model a simple multi-floor building as well as some “modern” furniture with UV mapping and radiosity. The animation part gives hints for the video sequence editor and logic bricks to produce a walkthrough as well as using the Gimp for postproduction.
The book seems to be written for an older Blender version,as there’s still mention of the old UV/Face Select mode, though it could have been updated as the publisher seems to “print it on demand”.
As this is the ONLY book about doing architectural modeling in Blender it receives two stars – one for its uniqueness and one for the instructional part.
I would consider buying the book again only at less than HALF the price considering the quality of print and the missing code mentioned already.
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|Terrific resource for the beginner.,
The instructions are direct and to the point. Filled with illustrations on almost every page. Topics covered include manipulating the interface, keyboard short cuts, modes, selecting objects, using the 3D cursor, modeling basics, detail modeling of architecture and furniture, materials, textures, UV mapping, basic lighting, Ambient Occlusion, Global Illumination with Yafray, Animation and Post Production using GIMP.
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|poor quality images,
Blender is a neat graphics program that has met with considerable usage, due to its free nature. There have already been several well done books devoted to Blender. Now this current book specialises to using Blender for architectural design. It may well be the first book to do so.
Sadly, it is marred by poor quality screen captures. The diagrams are screen captures of Blender windows. Almost all of these are hard to read. The book suffers in comparison to other Blender texts that have colour images. Here, the images are all grey scale. But even accounting for this, you might well compare this to other, non-Blender books that use grey scale images. Little care has been done to produce legible images. The big problem of course is that Blender is inherently a graphics program. Plus, it’s not just about the GUI. The images are meant to be from 3d objects inside a Blender world. It’s one thing to have a book on GUI widgets. But when the real emphasis is on actual images, we need good instances.
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