Book Review: Introducing Character Animation with Blender, 2nd Edition by Tony Mullen

This is the Blender 2.5 update to Mullen's very successful book on character animation. Since Blender 2.5 introduced a fairly dramatic change in interface design, this is a very useful update. This is a thick and extremely dense book that covers character animation from start to finish.

Since I just recently reviewed Jonathan Williamson's "Character Development in Blender 2.5", it's hard for me not to think in terms of comparisons between these two books. They are both excellent books, but they serve somewhat different purposes.

While Williamson's book is a textbook, optimized for linear reading and study, Mullen's book is more browsable, with lots of illustrations. It presents not one, but many different projects. It also puts less emphasis on modeling techniques, although it does demonstrate both "polygon" and "box" approaches to modeling.

After that, however, this book moves on to later steps, and especially spends a lot of time on the title subject of animation.

The book also offers some behind-the-scenes information on the Blender Open Movie projects, as well as Plumiferos, a feature-length animated film that was created using Blender.

As a result, this book is very exciting and full of interesting detail and ideas, but it is not as good as a textbook, and you'd find it harder to learn the basics with it. Tutorial steps are not described as finely. However, it provides excellent coverage of the whole process of character animation for advanced users.

In short: