Mon 5 Mar 2007

Capsule Review Of "Introducing Character Animation With Blender"

The UPS delivery man brought me my copy of Introducing Character Animation With Blender this morning. I've been hanging out for this book for months — ever since Tony Mullen started dropping hints (and then a clear announcement) on the blenderartists form that he was writing it.

Having taken an early lunch today — and spent a couple of hours this afternoon — to flick through the book and read a large portion of it, I think Tony has written a very nice piece of work. I obviously haven't worked through all the examples and tutorials yet, but the order in which he presents the information and his selection of material looks great.

Documenting a large, featureful Open Source project is extremely challenging work: along with the normal problems of finding a good presentation approach and doing all the writing, there is the need to strike a balance between producing something that is reasonably self-contained and not duplicating all of the existing online documentation and tutorials. Not to mention the fact that producing a book takes time, in which period the software has not entered any kind of feature freeze, so finding a way to appear up-to-date and a little future-proof is also necessary.

The first part of the book covers modelling, giving a step-by-step walkthrough of both polygon extrusion and box modelling methods (and why a combination of both is productive). The brief coverage of texturing and, particularly, UV mapping may be a little confusing to somebody who needed all the modelling steps explained, but that is an area that is fairly well covered at the beginner/intermediate level online anyway, so punting the interested user to the Blender wiki documentation for more information isn't a bad decision, I suspect. Creating an armature for the model is also discussed in detail here , as well as a quick excursion into recording shape keys in order to add facial controls.

The second part discusses the animation tools in some detail. When I was starting to puzzle out the animation features in Blender (an exercise that shall continue well into the future, I suspect), exactly how to place keyframe poses and then smooth out the in-betweens took a long time and lots of trial and (mostly) error. All of that's packed into a couple of chapters at the start of part II and looks clear.

The first half of chapter 11, on lighting, seems to take a long while to cover the basics, but since there probably isn't a really good document with comparitive examples for the basics floating around, I can see why this has to be covered. The result, though, is that combinations of lights for scenes doesn't really get much coverage at all, beyond the basic three-point setup (and here I like that Tony was willing to point out that it is still a useful setup, despite a certain amount of "looking down the nose" that goes on in some forums). Lighting is sufficiently difficult, subjective and flexible that attempting to cover it in detail is another book in itself and for people wanting to go a little further in Blender, Guillermo Romero's Introduction To Lighting from last year's Blender Summer of Documentation project is probably a good next step. At that point, reading less application-specific texts on CG lighting should be possible as well. So, this isn't really a failing of Tony's book — he concentrates on the modelling and animation sides of Blender and touches on the necessary but incidental features like lighting and rendering in sufficient depth that somebody using his book can see what they have produced.

Finally, part III has a quick description of the sorts of licenses involved in Open Source and open content — in particular, the GPL, Creative Commons and Blender Artistic licenses are singled out for mention. Coverage here is even-handed and a good introduction for people who may never have heard of this way of licensing work product. Then it's onto the interesting chapters for this part: a look at how the Elephants Dream and Plumíferos projects used and are using (respectively) Blender to create professional quality movies. In a couple of short chapters, there is good coherence with the rest of the book, in that you can see how the earlier techniques are used at this level, and some interesting information besides. I'm fairly familiar with Elephants Dream — I fairly religiously read the production blog as they were working on it, I hung out on the IRC channels from time to time as the new features were developed for the project and used CVS builds to try them out — but it was nice to read somebody else's impressions of the work (and see him try to explain the surreal plot to people who may be expecting your typical garden-variety short film).

Overall, the production seems nice enough. It seems to be able to lie flat without too many problems, so will be a good reference. Plenty of diagrams. Sometimes, the text gets a little behind the pictures, so you have to turn a page or, rarely, two, in order to see what is being written about. Hard to avoid that in densely illustrated books, though. The publishers (editors? author?) have chosen to use screenshots that look like the default Blender theme and except for a colour plates section before part III, all the images are greyscale. This does mean that it's sometimes not clear what is being talked about in the image (highlighted vertices and edges being one case that I found hard to spot sometimes, and one short showing face normals took a lot of looking to work it out and I knew what I was looking for already). The alternative would be to use a higher-contrast theme, but then it wouldn't look exactly the same as a beginner user's screen, leading to other confusions. Tough decision this, but I think the screenshot images could have been clearer in some cases.

All in all, I'm happy with the book and I had pretty high expectations to start with. I'm probably an intermediate-level user and I think I'll be keeping this volume near my desk when I'm playing with Blender. Somebody just starting out with Blender would find it useful, too, I would guess, although they would need to be prepared to go very slowly at the start, since modelling always takes a lot longer than you think it will and what takes a dozen pages to write down could be a week's worth of evenings, or more, to imitate on your own machine.

Thankyou, Tony, it was worth the wait.

Topics: software/graphics, books/reviews