The wow factor book

Yesterday, a young man in Australia became victim of his own success.

Andrew Price of blenderguru.com fame had demonstrated in the past that he can produce good and easy to understand blender text and video tutorials.

He peaked the community's interest when he announced an e-book -  “the wow-factor” - about the compositor of Blender 2.5, something that hasn't got a lot of coverage so far.

During the last weeks he released a sample chapter of his book and produced a promotional video worthy of a shopping channel.  Apart from detailing the content of the e-book, it listed all the bonuses which come with it, and culminated in the display of the e-book itself and all the bonuses as CDs and booklets which, of course, all exist - in good Blender fashion - only virtually.

One day before the release he offered a chance to win a free copy of the e-book.  It got 700+ entries which should have been a warning about what was going to hit him.

With only a few hours to go, his website become slower and slower, and when the first message "error 500" appeared, it was clear that the demand crashed his server.  The move to a more powerful home took another 3+ hours which deprived a few of his costumers of the chance to be among the first hundred buyers eligible for “the vault” - the collection of source material which made up the book.

Before going to bed myself, I skimmed the e-book.  It delivers what was promised: an overview of glares, blurs and optical effects - many of which most of us have never heard of - and how to create them in Blender. 

The bonuses provide additional information which are not available in this completeness at this time anywhere else.  The “node encyclopaedia”  for example will save you hours of gathering this information and will hopefully become part of the regular Blender documentation once the final 2.5 version is released, which can still take some time.

The reason that the compositor is not the most prominent feature in most other Blender tutorials is, that it is one of the last steps of creating something in Blender used to polish your render.  This means that you must already have something to work with – a fact that has been taken care of by two video tutorials showing how to build a scene in which to use the effects.  Unfortunately they are only available in a time limited fashion.

All in all it seems to provide a lot of useful information which I can hopefully learn during the coming weeks while reading, watching and listening to the provided material.

I wonder if there were free bonus steak knives mentioned in the commercial... .blend files would suffice. :-)