Throughout the book you’ll be shown Blender via three projects; a bat creature, a spider robot and a jungle ruins scene. These will teach you various Blender features such as modelling (robot parts, anatomy and bricks), texturing, and effects such as hair and water.
The book, unusually, begins with an introduction to GIMP of all things. But, since you’ll spend a fair bit of time creating textures in GIMP, this is no bad thing.
Chapter 3, Preparation, gives you some basic Blender info and starts your collection of source material for the bat creature and the jungle scene. Chapter 4 is where you get your hands dirty and begin extruding vertices, edges and faces. It may seem like a really simplistic tool, but it’s hugely powerful when combined with a smooth shading mode.
Now that you have the basic jagged model, Chapter 5 will show you how to add details such as foliage to your jungle ruin, wires and bits to your ‘bot, and eyes, fangs and nails to your creature.
Chapter 6 shows you how to use the sculpting mode of Blender. This is somewhat similar to what you’d see in Windows applications such as zSculpt.
Retopology (Chapter 7) went right over my head. Apparently it’s ‘the process of creating new geometry over an existing mesh while maintaining the object’s basic shape and rebuilding its topology’. I’ll take your word for it.
Chapter 8 is where you unwrap your model to begin texturing. Chapter 9 has you to adding hair to your bat beast. Chapter 10 gets you into texturing, 11 covers painting the texture in GIMP, and 12 deals with the creation of materials (in Blender).
No matter how much detail is in your model, it’s useless without lighting – and that’s Chapter 13. Getting the right lighting is how you make your model/scene seem bright and cheery, or dark and creepy.
Chapter 14 gets you the final rendered image. Either in one pass, or with various renders composited to a single image.
While this book is about Blender, it’s also partly a generic modelling book as it doesn’t teach you Blender in a click-this-click-that kind of way. You’ll need a different book (or our FCM Blender HowTo’s) for that. The book does show you where the basic Blender functions/buttons are, but nothing in depth.
The book may seem quite pricy, but bear in mind that it is full colour throughout, and, in both price brackets, you’re getting a PDF/mobile edition while the print edition has a DVD.
If you need a book to hold your hand and teach you to model and texture, this is not it. If you know the basics of Blender, and want to move up to the next level with modelling or texturing, then this is definitely what you want.