Foolish Assumptions

I wrote the first edition of this book for two sorts of beginners: people who are completely new to the world of 3D, and people who know a thing or two about 3D, but are completely new to Blender. With all the new interface changes in the latest version of Blender, this book is also targeted at another type of beginner: Blenderheads who have not yet made the plunge to using Blender since the heavy revisions were made in the 2.5 series.

Because of the various types of beginners this book addresses, I tend to err on the side of explaining too much rather than too little. If you're someone who is already familiar with another 3D computer graphics program, such as 3DS Max, Maya, Lightwave, or even an earlier version of Blender, you can probably skip a number of these explanations. Likewise, if you're a complete newbie, you may notice that I occasionally compare a feature in Blender to one in another package. However, that comparison is mostly for the benefit of these other users. I write so that you can understand a concept without having to know any of these other programs.

I do, however, make the assumption that you have at least a basic understanding of your computer. I assume that you know how to use a mouse, and I highly recommend that you use a mouse with at least two buttons and a scroll wheel. You can use Blender with a one- or two-button mouse, and I provide workarounds for the unfortunate souls in that grim state (*cough*Mac users*cough*), but it's certainly not ideal.

An exception is if you're using Blender with a drawing tablet like the ones produced by Wacom. Depending on the model, these devices have quite a variety on the number and type of buttons. For that reason, I focus primarily on using Blender with a mouse, although I will occasionally point out where having a tablet is helpful. Because Blender makes use of all your mouse buttons, I stipulate whether you need to left-click, right-click, or middle-click. And in case you didn't already know, pressing down on your mouse's scroll wheel typically accesses the middle mouse button.

I also assume that you're working with Blender's default settings and theme. You can customize the settings for yourself, but if you do, Blender may not behave exactly like I describe. Bearing in mind this point about Blender's themes, you may notice that the screenshots of Blender's interface are lighter in this book than you see on-screen because I created a custom Blender theme that would show up better in print. If I used Blender's default theme colors, all the figures in the book would appear overly dark. I include this custom theme in the companion DVD for this book for those of you who want your copy of Blender to match what's shown on these pages.

Remember that this book was written while parts of the latest version of Blender were still under development. As such, there may be a few inconsistencies between how things are shown in the book versus how they appear in the final release. That said, most of those inconsistencies should be pretty minor, and I document any differences on this book's companion Web site, www.dummies.com/go/blenderfd2e.