Blender 3D Basics Beginner's Guide: A quick and easy-to-use guide to create 3D modeling and animation using Blender 2.7 Paperback – August 26, 2014

This is the tome I've been looking for. It has an informal, take you by the hand and ease you in approach that'll help you get to know Blender's distinctive interface and get up to speed as quickly as possible. In addition, it's structured much like an actual class you might attend, with sections after each exercise that explain further "What Just Happened" as well as giving a short quiz after each section to help you retain what you've learned. Short of having an actual teacher living with you, I found this book to be an excellent way to ease into the more advance online videos and other tutes by giving you a solid background to build on. It's also geared to the latest version, the 2.7x release, so everything you learn will be as up-to-date as it's possible to get with printed material.

Great book for the beginning Blender user.

Covers vast majority of Blender. Great flow. Good chapter reviews. This is my winter project

very good very fast shipping

This is a truly great "How-To" book that would rate 5 stars except that once you get half-way through, the author assumes you've taken the time to do all the supplemental exercises along the way & are therefore so familiar with the interface that the step-by-step pictures & directions become sparse. I wanted to zip right through this the first time, then go back through it again in more detail, but was forced to start over & do all the recommended added exercises, in order to familiarize myself enough with the controls that I could figure out how to do the lessons past the half-way point. Still, I highly recommend this book for anyone, like me, who has been, or still is, struggling with learning Blender.

Great book to learn from!

OK. I read the other reviews, and they sound like glowing endorsements. Allow me to offer a more sober view, from the perspective of a complete novice to Blender, but someone who did pick up a minor in computer science during his doctoral program, that involved several programming classes, along with linear algebra and a math-oriented computer graphics course.First, Blender itself is mind-bogglingly complex. It's almost unfathomable how complicated this program is. It's far and away the most complex program I've ever tried to use, and I've used Mathematica for 20 years and Visual Studio for several. Any given object you create can literally have hundreds of attributes, each of which can, itself, have dozens to hundreds of individual sub-attributes and settings. Moreover, almost none of these attributes and settings will seem intuitively obvious to a beginner. So, trying to get launched with even a simple project feels like slogging through an endless swamp.As far as this particular book is concerned, chapters 1-5 aren't too bad, although you HAVE to go slowly, step-by-step, and you HAVE to download the examples package from the publisher's Web site, or you'll be completely lost.. Even so, chapter 6 is pretty much a nightmare, particularly from p. 192 on (that's as far as I've gotten so far). The text instructions are sketchy, important figures that could help you figure out what's going on are absent, and you're asked to perform tasks whose underlying logic is complex, but largely unexplained. Moreover, the author insists on exclusively using hotkeys (rather than the pulldown menu). And, there are scores and scores of hotkey combinations--easy to confuse and forget. After about the 40th combination, my head was literally reeling. IMHO, pulldown menues help mentally organize features & hotkeys can be learned later. But, that's just me, so take it for whatever you think it's worth.Finally, purchase of this particular book, even after mastered, won't make you a Blender expert. That's entirely obvious, even halfway through the book. Be prepared to buy 2-4 more books, and to search the Internet for tutorials on individual subjects, many of which are YouTubes. The point is that you're going to have to learn to THINK LIKE BLENDER. And, that is going to take very, very great patience, and a good deal of time and money spent on learning aids. For the average person, mastering Blender will be the hardest single thing they've done in their life.Put it this way: Learning Blender, for me, is exactly like going back to the very hardest parts of graduate school I ever had to endure. It requires creating a mental landscape inside yourself, composed of many, many concepts, all interconnected. It requires having to endure tutorials that often don't make sense, and having to figure things out on your own, up to and including the point at which you finally have to give up on the occasional lesson and simply try to move on. And, unless you're equipped with nearly limitless patience, and are prepared to swallow that entire lake of knowledge, learning just a little bit of it is probably not going to seem anything but frustrating.I realize that this may be the only review you read that isn't glowing and simplistic. But, at least you'll know it was written by a real person, and, certainly, nobody who may have been paid to make Blender sound like a piece of cake.

Good course.