This is a book review of Blender 3D: Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery.

As the title of the book aptly suggests, this is a book about Architectural Visualization and Blender 3D. It is written by Allan Brito who is a Brazilian architect.

The structure of the content is systematically laid out. The writing style and grammar-usage are straight forward too. These make for easy reading and understanding. The book is also well-furnished with much screen shots that support the written texts. Having read much books on 3D modeling and graphics, I must say that this book is one of the clearer and easier-to-understand one. To use this book, one does not need prior experience of Blender 3D which is a powerful open-source 3D application. However, a basic knowledge of architectural and interior design is recommended for clear understanding.

This book covers Blender basics as well as much information pertaining to architecture and interior related modeling and rendering. If you already owned the Essential Blender Book, this book will have much informational overlap with the latter, thus reducing its value. Nevertheless, there are also much valuable content that will be of good use, especially to a person who is interested in this particular field of 3D work.

In my opinion, some of the content of this book that are especially valuable to the field of architecture/interior-related 3D design and graphics include:

1. Techniques for precision modeling of architectural elements such as buildings.

2. Techniques for furniture modeling.

3. Methods for Architectural/interior-styled lighting

4. Integration with Yafray (external renderer) and GIMP

5. Information on creating interactive animations using the game engine

These above-mentioned areas of the book’s content are what that makes it stand apart from the other Blender books on the market. No doubt, these information may be found elsewhere, either online or in other publications. However, Allan Brito’s book goes further by organising them in a way that is cohesive and highly relevant to the architectural and interior design and project work flow.

Who will best benefit from this book? In my opinion, if you are new to Blender and am interested in using it for architectural and interior visualization, this book will prove to be indispensable. I can envisage this book being useful to students and professionals within the architectural and interior-design fields. If you are looking for an open source or low-cost solution to your architectural/interior design and visualization needs, you could well benefit from the acquisition of this book.

The book can be purchased via the following URL:

http://www.packtpub.com/create-3d-architecture-buildings-scenery-with-blender/book

Additionally, for every book sold, Packt, which is the publisher for this book, donates a royalty directly to the Blender Project. This helps to support Blender and its development, which ultimately benefits you as a user as the software gets to be continually improved.