A couple of months back, I went to Nanjing (南京) in China to conduct a 3D course (meant to be in English 😉 ). I used Blender 3D as the platform for course delivery. When I was there, what I noticed was that like most other places, China’s 3D scene is highly dominated by the industry bigs such as 3DS Max. There isn’t much materials in Chinese on Blender. Well, things are going to change soon. 🙂

Mr Ethan Luo (罗聪翼) , who is an expert Chinese Blender User, is in the process of writing the first Blender Guidebook in Chinese ! He is from Chengdu, China. He received a lot of support from the BlenderCN community as well as helpful feedbacks from many Blenderheads around the world. The book will be called Blender: The Definitive Guide/Blender 权威指南. This book will be a milestone and will be used in helping to introduce this great 3D suite to the people in the big country of China.

According to Mr Luo:

“No matter whether you are a new learner for Blender or have supported Blender for years, this book will serve to help in learning and upgrading one’s knowledge with regards to Blender. The book will be unique in the sense that apart from covering all the basic functionalities of Blender topic-wise, it also contain 4 large-scale project tutorials.

In the basic section, I will try to explain every features. It will be supported by coverage of background principle such as
arithmetic. This is because I believe one may need to understand the entire workflow. Modeling, texturing, lighting, shading and modifiers will be explained in this section.

The next section will cover advanced topics and areas, inclusive of rendering, node, compositing, simulation, animation, python basic and BGE function. This section also contains some small example projects after the initial detailed walkthrough.

In the final section of the book, I will cover projects involving car modelling, character, rig design and walking cycle animation workflow as well as interior with Yafaray for big projects. From what I have seen, a lot of Blender tutorial and documentation treat individual topics as separate entities, and never discuss the complete workflow of dealing with a large-scale project. So I would love to present everything from my experience in this section to help you complete your own project.”

Currently, the book is still under development. Mr Ethan plans to ship this book with version 2.6 of Blender. The book will have an estimate of more than 700 pages. The publisher is HZBook. The book is planned for both hard copy and soft copy (ebook) distribution. You could order it from the following websites or China mainland’s book store:

www.china-pub.com
www.amazon.cn
www.dangdang.com

As of this writing, the price has not been fixed yet. It will be online for pre-order soon.

Mr Ethan is extremely generous. He plans to donate all the royalty incomes from this book to the BlenderCN.org website to support its improvement and future plans. So this book will also be considered the first official production from BlenderCN.

Below are some project/renders from the Book.

As you can see for yourself, these stuffs are of very high quality. This book will certainly add to the overall quality of Blender 3D proficiency in China or places with Chinese language users. 🙂