This book is aimed at the professionals that already have good 3D CGI experience with commercial packages and have now decided to try the open source Blender and want to experiment with something more complex than the average tutorials on the web.

However, it's also aimed at the intermediate Blender users who simply want to go some steps further.

It's taken for granted that you already know how to move inside the Blender interface, that you already have 3D modeling knowledge, and also that of basic 3D modeling and rendering concepts, for example, edge-loops, n-gons, or samples.

In any case, it's also possible for a keen beginner to follow this book, by combining it with the manual on the BlenderWiki or preceding it with a basic Blender UI tutorial on the web.

The keyboard/mouse shortcuts for the operations in the recipes are, at least in all the more relevant cases, indicated in brackets.