The first portion of the book covers mainly a broad perspective of how Blender can be integrated into real world production pipelines and applications. As someone who is not natively-trained in the area of movie-making and animation, this book offers a fresh and informative perspective into that particular industry and field.

Nodes compositing and video editing come later in the second half of the book’s content.  The Nodes section provides  examples of Node compositions that are very useful. Much tips and techniques for creating special efforts are covered within the book.

Unlike many Blender Books, this one is fully in colour. However, the paper quality is not of high resolution gloss. I guess, this help in reducing the cost of production. I can certainly live with that. Notwithstanding the paper quality, the coloured screenshots are very helpful and indispensable for the delivery of information.

In all, I find Foundation Blender Compositing very useful. This 400+ page book is loaded with much information on the Compositing aspect of Blender. It fills an unique niche in the market with regards to Blender Books.

Official Guide To Using DAZ Studio To Create Beautiful Art comes in colour and is of good paper quality. Geared towards beginner and intermediate users of DAZ Studio, the book contains many explanatory pictures and renderings. This helps in making the content easy to read and understand.

This book is more than a technical manual. It teaches the reader techniques for creating compelling artwork using the free DAZ Studio software. This includes methods of getting the right poses and portraying the intended emotion of the 3D character.  There is also a section on working with non-human characters.

The content on the included CD is worth the entire value of the book alone. The CD content contains full 3D applications and digital contents. Beside DAZ Studio, the full version of Carrara 6 Pro and Hexagon 2.5 are included on the CD. How amazing ! These are powerful 3D apps with the combined value of hundreds of dollars ! Carrara is a full 3D modelling, rendering and animation package, while Hexagon is a dedicated 3D modeller.

To buy the book or get more info, click the Book Cover below.

As the title of the book aptly suggests, this is a book about Architectural Visualization and Blender 3D. It is written by Allan Brito who is a Brazilian architect.

The structure of the content is systematically laid out. The writing style and grammar-usage are straight forward too. These make for easy reading and understanding. The book is also well-furnished with much screen shots that support the written texts. Having read much books on 3D modeling and graphics, I must say that this book is one of the clearer and easier-to-understand one. To use this book, one does not need prior experience of Blender 3D which is a powerful open-source 3D application. However, a basic knowledge of architectural and interior design is recommended for clear understanding.

This book covers Blender basics as well as much information pertaining to architecture and interior related modeling and rendering. If you already owned the Essential Blender Book, this book will have much informational overlap with the latter, thus reducing its value. Nevertheless, there are also much valuable content that will be of good use, especially to a person who is interested in this particular field of 3D work.

In my opinion, some of the content of this book that are especially valuable to the field of architecture/interior-related 3D design and graphics include:

1. Techniques for precision modeling of architectural elements such as buildings.

2. Techniques for furniture modeling.

3. Methods for Architectural/interior-styled lighting

4. Integration with Yafray (external renderer) and GIMP

5. Information on creating interactive animations using the game engine

These above-mentioned areas of the book’s content are what that makes it stand apart from the other Blender books on the market. No doubt, these information may be found elsewhere, either online or in other publications. However, Allan Brito’s book goes further by organising them in a way that is cohesive and highly relevant to the architectural and interior design and project work flow.

Who will best benefit from this book? In my opinion, if you are new to Blender and am interested in using it for architectural and interior visualization, this book will prove to be indispensable. I can envisage this book being useful to students and professionals within the architectural and interior-design fields. If you are looking for an open source or low-cost solution to your architectural/interior design and visualization needs, you could well benefit from the acquisition of this book.

The book can be purchased via the following URL:

http://www.packtpub.com/create-3d-architecture-buildings-scenery-with-blender/book

Additionally, for every book sold, Packt, which is the publisher for this book, donates a royalty directly to the Blender Project. This helps to support Blender and its development, which ultimately benefits you as a user as the software gets to be continually improved.