Book advice

So I was into blender several years ago and loved it, but then I started pursuing a career in Nursing and stopped because I simply did not have the time.

Now I want to get back into it, but I’ve forgotten most of what I learned, and I’m finding myself having to start from the beginning. Unfortunately all my books are out of date and I keep getting stuck as features have changed and the book is no longer relevant. I hear the last major change was 2.5, so I assume any book written for 2.5 will be relevant for the current version.

Unfortunately the blender store doesn’t say what version the books were written for. So my question is where these books written for 2.5 or later?

http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=170
http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=153

Hi, if you are just starting out I would recommend the following as they have helped me a lot :

Blender Master Class: A Hands-On Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering By Ben Simonds
Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 By Roland Hess

You can find these on amazon. Good luck.

Also the latest version of the Blender for Dummies by vanGumster would be worth checking out.

And you can also find a lot of video tutorials these days. BlenderGuru.com has a number of excellent ones, as does CGCookie.com. Some of the ones on the latter one are for Citizen members, but I think it’s totally worth it if you can afford it. Both sites have a number of videos on modeling, texturing, and even a little animation. You can find more character stuff on CG Cookie, but both are great.

On YouTube, check out Tutor4U and BlenderDiplom.

(I know you specifically mentioned books, but the video tutorials from these 4 sources in particular are all very well done and fit a wide range of abilities from newbie to veteran.)

Im abit of a book hoarder and enjoy reading anything digital art related and i have alot of recent and old 3d modeling books and also alot of usfual tuts and info found on the web iv turned into pdf’s for reading at times i cant get online.
both those books you have linked (especialy the Game Development With Blender iv still to add to my collection) are both uptodate and in accordance with recent blender builds, even the older books can be translated into recent builds of blender maybe not by following step by step but that knowlage comes with getting stuck in and familiarizing yourself with all the tools.
Dont just look into blender books and tutorials also
Alot of max,maya,silo etc tuts and books can be translated into blenders workflow and when following these and finding parts that use different toolset’s it’s a matter of thinking “how and in what way can i do this in blender?”

Anyways (rambbling on now) there are so many recource’s available on and around the web and if there is anything in paticular you are looking for i.e. character modeling, hardsurface modeling ,texturing ect let me know and i can whip up a download link of some of the recource’s i like to read through myself.

goodluck and welcome back to blender :slight_smile:

Thank you All. your information has been most useful. And thank you for your offer KennyW, but for now I don’t know what I want beyond “something!” I might take up your offer at a later date though.

If you want to do any simulation stuff, you need to check out BlenderHD. Jonathan Lampel does the tutorials and he does mostly smoke sims and rigid body sims. There aren’t very many tutorials there but there worth it.

I happen to think later… There’s two other books I’d recommend, though they aren’t Blender specific. The first one I heard about from Jonathan Williamson when I took the Mastering Modeling in Blender course, and that is [digital] Modeling by William Vaughn. It’s an excellent book on various aspects of modeling. Another great book in the same series is [digital] Lighting and Rendering by Jeremy Birn. There’s a third book, [digital] Texturing and Painting by Owen Demers, that I haven’t had the chance to read yet, but is on my list of ones to find. (Of the 3, the last one is the only one not available on Kindle as far as I can tell… or wasn’t when I got the other two.)