Howdy folks. This book is your guide to learning Blender 2.6. It assumes no previous knowledge of
Blender, although old Blender users will find a lot to learn here too. Some beginner texts are dressed-up
reference manuals, while some try to teach everything and end up teaching nothing. This book will teach
you how to use Blender 2.6, and to actually use it well.
Being an artist consists of having a certain set of skills, having a point of view, and making choices. On
the skill side, you must be familiar with your tools. And before that, you need to simply know what tools
are available, and what they can do. On the other side, creating art with those tools is a series of choices,
informed by observation and experience. You’ll have to supply the observations—your unique viewpoint
and way of processing the world—but hopefully this book will let you make use of some of my own
experience to give your own a head start. Blender is a complex application with thousands of controls,
properties, and ways of working. Not all of them are useful. In fact, when you are learning the basics of
the medium, it turns out that trying to learn too much esoteric stuff can hurt you.
This isn’t to say that what you can create with the basic tools can’t be pleasing or even art. It can. Think
of it this way. Ninety-five percent of the time in 3D, the set of tools you’ll learn here will satisfy your
needs. The other 5% of the time, well … once you get good, the rest of the tools will actually be much
easier to learn and apply because you have the fundamentals down. Build a strong foundation, and you
will be ahead of the many others who started putting stakes in the ground wherever their fancy led them.