Review: 3D Modeling For Beginners: Learn everything you need to know about 3D Modeling! by Danan Thilakanathan

To be frank, I had low expectations of this book but I wanted to give it a chance anyhow. Judging from the cover, this was another self-published e-book, but it was included for free with Kindle Unlimited, so I thought I would check it out. The advice in the book is surprisingly decent, but this is really for beginners only. Like if you’ve never opened a 3D modeling app before, I could see this being okay. On the other hand, if you have any experience whatsoever in 3D there is not much to learn here.

The book itself is around 240 pages, but it’s a fairly quick read, maybe 1 or 2 hours max, depending on your reading speed. So not a huge time investment, and I read it for free, so I won’t complain too much. However, the author assumes a very informal tone throughout the text, and many times makes off-the-cuff remarks that feel like he wrote it in one go without editing or any sort of research. Most of the book is explaining general concepts, like what polygons are, discussing modeling styles (like box modeling), curves and vertices, etc. Later in the book there are a few short tutorials (and the author is using Blender) but these are not a huge focus. Overall a decent foundation if you’ve never used a 3D app before but, even then, you might be better off with a book that is more practice focused and a higher quality production.

So while I can’t find anything particularly wrong with the advice here, some of it is actually okay, after finishing the book I am not sure I learned anything. I do understand I’m not the target audience, but I do like to read books of all difficulty levels, because I find there are sometimes useful tricks unique to each book. But here, the information is fairly general and the overall production quality is not great. It’s basically what you would expect from looking at the cover and reading the preview. I do like giving starting authors a fair chance, even if the cover looks low quality, but I am let down more often than not. This book wasn’t bad per se, but it’s not the great either. So if you are a total beginner, maybe this would give you some motivation and a quick overview of what 3D modeling is about, but it’s far too basic for anyone else. But as I said, I read the book for free and spent about 2 hours on it, so not the end of the world.