Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review




A very good book for beginners who want to delve more on architectural aspects, November 10, 2008
By Marlo Simon Noval (Philippines)
Last Oct. 24 I received a copy of Blender 3D - Architecture, Buildings and Scenery. While snail mail here in Philippines is slower than a snail (is there an animal like that? xD), I'm still pretty excited about this book. And I have finished it reading last week, Saturday.

The book was authored by Allan Brito who specializes on information visualization. Having a background in 3ds Max and began knowing Blender since 2003, since then Allan made huge contributions for Blender, from useful tutorials to books. [...] You can also look at one of his site which is dedicated on architectural visualization with Blender blender3darchitect.com.

After two weeks, from busy in school to going back home and reading this book, I'm really happy that I finally finished reading it. This book was my first Blender book. So I'm kinda oriented on learning by Googling tutorials over the net. After scraping over all the pages, I realized that this was an all in one book. It has everything you need but of course focuses itself on architectural aspects like working with CAD files and detailed modeling for furniture's plus many more.

All in all it has 14 chapters. The first six chapters introduces architectural visualization with Blender, the blender interface and modeling. The modeling part also explains on how to work with CAD files. Then from Chapter 7 upto 9, it teaches how to apply materials, textures and UV Mapping. There's even explanations on Ray Tracing like reflections and shadows. Chapter 10 to 12 intrigue me most because it teaches setting up lights, using radiosity and ambient occlusion, and especially a good tutorial on global illumination with YafRay. The 13th Chapter introduces the normal animating stuff, but it also teaches interactive animation using the Game Engine! The last chapter is guide to using GIMP (a free software graphic application) for post-production.

This book is very good for people in architecture who wants to start using Blender as their 3d application. The book is a complete guide from building 3d models, materials, textures, lights, animation, to post production. In total, this is a good book for beginners who want to delve more on architectural aspects. And also this might be good for some experienced blender users who wants to understand more on detailed modeling, texturing options, radiosity, and global illumination with an external renderer namely YafRay.

I'm one of the people who are expecting for a Part 2 of this book. As this book has a good sense on explaining the important things in architectural visualization.

So go grab one now!



Blender 3D: Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery , November 6, 2008
By W. Alford
Calling all architects! If you are looking to add a little pizzazz in your presentations, look no further than Blender. This book tells you how to build architectural settings both inside and out. What client wouldn't be impressed with a 3D presentation of their project, complete with details.

Author Allan Brito takes you through the basics of the program an on to the finer points of architectural visualization. He gives you web sites where you can obtain images to use in your architectural renderings. So you don't have to create pieces from scratch. He also gives you web sites of rendering engines that can be used with Blender, but the book concentrates on the rendering engine YafRay.

Are you already producing renderings in a CAD program? Allan shows you how to import and use these drawings to produce 3D renderings. He also shows you how to organize your materials and start a texture library.

The author discusses lighting and the types of lighting available to you in Blender. Coming from a photographic background and understanding lighting and color temperature, I found his lighting knowledge a bit weak, but he still provides enough information to help you light a scene.

Allan shows you how to set up cameras and angles and how to switch from one camera to another. Visualization is nothing without the camera and he shows you just what to do with them and how to do it.

Brito discusses at some length animating architectural renderings. This adds a bit more snap to your presentation to your client. There is nothing like having a client take a virtual, visual walk-through their project. It could mean the difference between a successful campaign or not.

Lastly he takes you through post-production with the open source program Gimp. This chapter talks about the Gimp interface, but does not go into much detail about post-production techniques. If you want more information about how to use Gimp check out the book, The Artist's Guide to Gimp Effects.

Although the book assumes some experience with Blender, it still has the information needed to accomplish tasks like building walls, floors, windows and doors. It is a must have if you plan to do 3D architectural renderings and are wanting to add to your architectural rendering repertoire.



An excellent book for Blender, October 30, 2008
By J. R. Cardona
Blender is one of the most popular open source and free 3D creation suites.
Many professionals use Blender in their daily work, for architecture, movies, or 3D modeling and animation in general.

Blender is a very powerful tool that can give you professional results with no cost. But learning how to use it is not easy for everyone.
This book, "Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery", by Allan Brito, comes to solve this problem.
Written in understandable language, makes using Blender simple and easy.

Albeit the author tells us that this is not an introductory book to Blender, the fact is that someone that is not familiarized with it at all can read the book, follow what it says and end being a skilled modeler.
Modeling inorganic shapes is an excellent way to master 3D modeling. And this book can give you all the keys for doing it as a professional.

Its author is Allan Brito, a Brazilian architect specialized in information visualization that works with Blender to produce visualization and instructional material.
He teaches 3D modeling, animation and multimedia at Mauricio De Nassau College (Brazil).

This is a book that can be valuable for architects, game designers, 3D artists, and movie makers. But also for every 3D fan that wants to model, animate and render interiors, buildings, furniture, and much more.

It covers everything from modeling objects, cameras, exporting, optimizing, post-production retouch with the GIMP, lightning, texturing and materials, adding virtual humans to scenes and other objects to increase realism, developing your own libraries to work faster, use YafRay to render photorealistic images of your works, animation, video-tours...

All this is teach through 14 chapters. Chapters 1-5 tell you how to build your own 3D models. You will learn how to use very specialized modeling tools that Blender has, like Loop Subdivide or Remove Doubles. Also, you'll master the proportional and precise editing of architectural models, even how to create curved walls on building interiors.
Chapter 6 tells how to add furniture models, giving you some Internet addresses where you can get reference images to use.
In chapters 7 and 8 you can learn how to apply materials and textures. There's even explanations on how to create glass material, and self-illumination.
Chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12 deal with rendering and lighting, teaching you things like UV mapping (attach a texture to particular portions of a 3D mesh), volumetric shadows, and radiosity.
Number 13 is about how to use camera and create animation and videos.
Finally, chapter 14 is a quick guide to post-production retouch of your rendered images in GIMP, the free image editor.

In addition, the publisher -Packt Publishing- pays a royalty to Blender project, so buying a book from Packt Publishing you are indirectly supporting the open source project of that book (in this case, Blender). This way, you help the developers by helping yourself.

There are two kinds of people that may find this book useful: the skilled user that wants to get the most of Blender when modeling architecture scenes, and the user that wants to start using Blender but also wants to reach a high level on these skills.

In both cases, this is a complete book that has all that you need.




Good book for starters, October 20, 2008
By Andreas van de Geijn (Cuijk, Netherlands)
After learning the Blender basics from the Blender website, I knew that I was going to like this tool, but needed some more 'help'.
As I want to use it for architectural design: houses, furniture etc. I was thinking that this is the book for me.
It gives a clear overview of which Blender tools are supporting you in making this happen. In the end you will not be an expert, but know what is Blender capable of.
What I'm missing are some nice examples, specially as the cover of the book shows a real teaser.
So a good book for beginners who like to work on architectural items, likely not good enough for experts. For this last group, it would be nice to have a 'part 2' version.



Great for new Blender users and veterans alike, October 16, 2008
By Variable Rush (Yurusu.net)
There's several open source graphic design programs. And, of course, the main one of them all is Blender. From Big Buck Bunny to Project Orange and everything in between, Blender is a very versatile imaging program.

Of course, this doesn't mean it's easy to use, the old adage of "easy to play, difficult to master" comes to mind.

I've been using Blender for a couple years now and thought I knew a bit of everything Blender had to offer, but I was wrong. I picked up this book by Allan Brito figuring it'd be a refresher in things I already knew.

Not only does it show a few things I already knew, but a bit more on things I didn't know. Even my mother, who has used Blender far longer than I have, was able to learn a great deal from this book.

The primary focus of the book is on creating building interiors and lighting effects, but the lessons learned can be put to different uses within Blender.

In all, I'd say this is a great book for new Blender users and veterans alike