Product Description

In Detail

This book will show you how to create realistic architectural models in Blender. Blender is an open-source 3D animation program released as free software. It can be used for modeling, texturing, skinning, animating, and so on. It runs on all the important operating systems (including Windows, Mac, and Linux).

You can create natural scenery, landscapes, plants, various weather conditions, environmental factors, building materials such as wood, metal, brick, and more. You will also learn how to add people to different scenes as well as other objects to an already existing photograph or a video making it easier to increase its realism.

You will see how to use the final models to create simpler scenes for use in 3D games, where real-time rendering is necessary. You will also see how to use them to create the sets for animated movies.

What you will learn from this book?

• Build detailed and realistic models of buildings, furniture, and landscapes
• Create interior views of rooms and offices and exterior views of buildings, landscapes, and courtyards
• Produce video tours of the buildings and environments you create
• Export simple versions of your models for use in games and interactive environments
• Export still images and use the GIMP to give them a final polish
• Use natural and artificial light sources to illuminate your scenes in a realistic way
• Apply textures to building surfaces to produce more detailed and realistic scenes
• Add humans and other `props' to your scenes to increase their realism
• Develop a library of textures, materials, objects that you can use over and over again
• Use the YafRay raytracer to create astonishingly realistic, photo quality images
• How to import materials between scenes
• Create interactive animations

Approach

The book consists of a lot of exciting examples, which are shaped using the various features of Blender. It consists of step-by-step instructions leading you to realistic models of buildings, landscapes, and more. A collection of amazing screenshots will add up excitement to your learning experience. You can build realistic 3D models that can be used while creating different animation projects.

The printed version of the book is in black and white, but a full color version of the images is available for download on : Packtpub.com. The eBook version, available from Packt, is in full color.

Who this book is written for?

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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94248 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 332 pages

From the Publisher
DETAIL

This book will show you how to create realistic architectural models in Blender. Blender is an open-source 3D animation program released as free software. It can be used for modeling, texturing, skinning, animating, and so on. It runs on all the important operating systems (including Windows, Mac, and Linux).

You can create natural scenery, landscapes, plants, various weather conditions, environmental factors, building materials such as wood, metal, brick, and more. You will also learn how to add people to different scenes as well as other objects to an already existing photograph or a video making it easier to increase its realism.

You will see how to use the final models to create simpler scenes for use in 3D games, where real-time rendering is necessary. You will also see how to use them to create the sets for animated movies.

Approach

The book consists of a lot of exciting examples, which are shaped using the various features of Blender. It consists of step-by-step instructions leading you to realistic models of buildings, landscapes, and more. A collection of amazing screenshots will add up excitement to your learning experience. You can build realistic 3D models that can be used while creating different animation projects.

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Customer Reviews

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.

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.

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.