Animating With Blender is in my hands!
Aug 19th, 2008 by admin
I have in my hands my first advance copy of Animating with Blender: How To Create Short Animations from Start to Finish! It looks really nice. In the end, I wasn’t super jazzed about the cover design, but due to production issues we had run out of time. Oh well. It’s certainly a friendly cover, although it doesn’t convey the depth in which the whole pipeline is explained.
At the end of August, I’ll be doing the web release of The Beast, in 720p HD. There will be downloadables, a crummy YouTube version, and a nice streaming HD version on Vimeo. When it’s time, it’ll get it’s own page, as well as a link from here and the main Blender forums, just to make sure that no one misses it. I’m down to re-working the titles in HD. The animation itself is re-rendered, and I only have to finish the titles and pump the whole thing through the final compositing network, which takes several hours.
I’ve just gone back and read some bits and pieces from the book, and it’s such a different experience from writing or revising it on screen. I’ve found that while I’m writing something, I think it’s great. Then, when it’s out of my hands my confidence in the voice and material falls by several orders of magnitude, and I’m convinced it sucks and will be the object of ridicule. Finally, when I dare to crack the cover of the finished piece, I read a little and find myself saying “not bad… not bad…” and even “that’s pretty good…” in some places. Thus it was with The Essential Blender, and hopefully how it will be with this
The real test, though, is when people in the target audience finally get the book. Despite accusations of arrogance from time to time throughout my life (It’s just confidence I tell you!), I know enough to realize that I’m not the one who will ultimately declare something I write anything better than “good.” That can be done by others, and only if it deserves it. We’ll see next month!
When I saw that the book was up for pre order at Amazon, I said yea. I ordered it. If it is as good as Essential it will be a worth while investment. Thanks for taking the time to write it. Now you need to get back to Blender people. No rest for the wicked.
Horray!
You may wish to consider publishing to http://blip.tv instead of Vimeo. They are also HD, but have significantly better terms of use, are more “open source friendly” and interact with external applications like Miro much better.
Good news on all fronts!
How about a screening of your flick at Creative Treehouse?
Christopher: checked out bliptv. Looks good. Thanks for the tip.
Gary: Actually, I showed The Beast to a small audience at CT a couple of weeks ago during WPLUG’s Open Movie night. The whole thing was really well received, and I might check about doing it again if I think there would be enough interest.
Hello,
looking forward to buying this book, I already have the Essential Blender, which is very useful (I teach some basic animation modules at university level). Will there be an ebook version of the upcoming book for sale by any chance? I live on a far corner of the planet and shipping doubles / triples the cost of the paper version.