Blender 2.49 Scripting 51
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the read-all-about-it dept.
from the read-all-about-it dept.
terrywallwork writes "A few days ago I received an email from Packt Publishing informing me of their new Blender 2.49 Scripting book. I was very interested in reading this book as there are very few Blender books that cover the scripting aspect of Blender 2.49 and Python. So I navigated my way to the packt publishing website and ordered myself the ebook version. They were having a special at the time and I ended up getting a full color ebook for less than £9. If nothing else the price is extremely impressive." Read on for the rest of terrywallwork's review.
The author is Michel Anders, known as varkenvarken on Blender Artists forum. He is an extremely talented Blender Python scripter and has written many very useful scripts for Blender. Knowing who is behind this book explains a lot about the way this books is constructed.| Blender 2.49 Scripting | |
| author | Michel J. Anders |
| pages | 292 |
| publisher | Packt Publishing |
| rating | 7.5/10 |
| reviewer | terrywallwork |
| ISBN | 1849510407 |
| summary | This book is for users comfortable with Blender as a modeling and rendering tool who want to expand their skills to include Blender scripting |
The teaching approach taken, is to present a series of tasks that need to be achieved and then present sections of scripts that demonstrate the most important concepts and Blender Python code, to allow the tasks to be carried out.
At the beginning of the book a basic explanation of some of the terms and concepts are gone over and a few very simple Blender python commands are demonstrated to do the equivalent of a Blender Hello World script. This beginning part of the book is the only part that really can be classed as beginner level, everything after this has a much steeper learning curve.
Many of the scripts written by Michel are very technically advanced scripts, the same also holds true for this book. Most of the scripts and techniques described within require a very good level of understanding. I debated with myself as to weather it is an Intermediate/Advanced level book, but one thing is certain, if you are a beginning Blender user and your Python knowledge is beginner level, you will struggle to get much from Michel's latest work. I think that to get anything out of this material a very good understanding of Python, Blender and Mathematics (especially vector math and 3D related mathematics) will be required.
Assuming you have the requisite knowledge all the bases of using Blender through Python scripting are covered, for example, setting up materials, ipo manipulation, texture setting, texture nodes and so on. But again very simple things are not covered. To me it seems that it is assumed that you will just read the Blender Python API docs for the very simple things such as how to do rotations and scaling on objects, deleting and adding vertices, etc. You will have to be prepared to get a lot of information from the scripts supplied rather than be spoon fed information.
So if you are very knowledgeable with Blender and Python you will likely find that this book is very handy as it covers ways of scripting and leveraging Blender Python scripting to do some very clever things. I do think it would have been very helpful to have a less steep learning curve but that's a matter of my personal taste.
I am not a Python expert and so this has probably affected my ability to properly appreciate this book, that said I can see that a lot of time and effort has gone into putting this book together, especially given thw fact the Python scripting books for Blender are so few and far between.
It probably hasn't escape most Blender users notice that Blender 2.5 is now currently in Alpha state and it uses completely different scripting model, so stuff learned in this book unfortunately won't transfer to Blender 2.5, as it uses Python 3 and has a completely different API structure.
This book would of been much more relevant if it have been released a year or 2 earlier. Still if you're used Blender 2.49 and need an advanced Blender scripting book, you now have one to read.
I really hope Michel does a Blender 2.6 version when it comes out, and maybe makes it slightly more targeted at beginners and experts, so my head doesn't hurt quite so much.
You can purchase Blender 2.49 Scripting from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Blender 2.49 still very much alive (Score:3, Insightful)
With the excitement around 2.5, it's easy to forget that Blender 2.49 still very much alive and kicking.
Still, 2.49 feels ancient, probably because it's UI is still kind of idiot-savant. It's horrendous at most things, but incredibly good at many things that matter. On top of that, it just looks very dated. 2.5 looks like it's on its way to cleaning most of that up while keeping the core strengths.
As for scriptability, I'd really love the see the Blender Foundation detach RNA to the point where one can start to create bindings in other languages, like Javascript, C# (Mono), etc.
Re:Blender 2.49 still very much alive (Score:2, Insightful)
I think if Blender can adopt a Unity-like approach, where it has baked-in at 2 or 3 languages that serve 2 different audiences, then it might be workable. But I agree that creating add-on bindings would fragment Blender scripting and make life miserable.
Given their current workload, my hope is that they will revisit it in 2.7 or so, after 2.6 gets stabilized.
Re:£9 for a PDF? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, because when you buy a book (or anything) all you pay for is the cost of reproduction. When you buy a car, it costs exactly the sum of its parts, plus the labor involved in putting them together. Not one dollar for R&D, not a dime for advertising, not one penny for any of the thousands of people working for the car company, except for the guys who physically put it together.
Re:Blender 2.49 still very much alive (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe not fun for people who want to use large numbers of other people's code/scripts a lot, and don't do their own scripting.
Very fun and beneficial for people who want to write and use their own scripts. Of course it's worth it to them to install the bindings and modules they need.
The alternative to providing multiple bindings might be that scripts don't get written/published in the first place, because people have trouble doing exactly what they want in the 'standard' language.
Re:Blender 2.49 still very much alive (Score:3, Insightful)
I see what you mean when a project is shared (for example included with Blender as an example project). I doubt this will be an issue for the majority of Blender users who have no intention at all of sharing their project files. Even if you decided to develop your own binding and language just for your own specific in-house task, as long as your work is proprietary it's not going to be any more of an issue than my private collection of shell scripts that so specific to my purposes they're essentially useless to anyone else.