Chapter 1. Introducing Blender and Animation
Welcome, it's a good guess that you are interested in learning how to do 3D animation. You've chosen Blender 3D and you want to learn how to use it. This book is a good choice. We did research on what hurdles new users faced and what their frustrations with other training methods were. So we will go step-by-step, learning how to use Blender comfortably to create animations, do modeling, lighting, camera work, and much more. You will start out with simple steps, get comfortable using the Blender interface, make and animate a rowboat, then a sloop, and create your own private island as shown in the following screenshot:
This first chapter will get us gently into Blender:
We will talk about general animation and look at a few videos. The videos give us a quick introduction to general animation principles.
We will watch some early computer graphics to see how using animation principles benefited early 3D animation.
After that, there will be the top-ten reasons to enjoy Blender.
We will look at what people use 3D for.
And then we'll be ready to focus on the inner workings of Blender itself in the other chapters.
