No book is the product of just the author—he just happens to be under the spotlight with his name on the cover. The contribution of a number of people was crucial to bring this book to fruition, and it would take far more space than I have available to thank each one individually.

A special note goes to Chaitanya Apte, Hyacintha D'Souza, and Joel Goveya from Packt Publishing, without whom this book wouldn't exist. Thank you for believing in me, and for all the wonderful guidance and professionalism throughout these months. You and the entire Packt Publishing team did an outstanding job to help produce a high quality publication.

I must also thank the coding wizards who don't get tired of making Blender such an amazing tool, which crosses the line of being just an open source graphics application to be a respected tool by all CG professionals, regardless of its license. I'm grateful to people such as Ton Roosendaal, the head of the Blender Foundation, who is the main man responsible for what Blender has become; artists such as Bassam Kurdali and Nathan Vegdahl, from whom I've learned a lot by studying their rigging approaches; and the active user community in forums and discussion lists, such as blenderbrasil-dev in Google Groups. Aside from Blender fellows, I'm also very thankful to the guys at Nitrocorpz Design Studio, where I gained more experience and knowledge working on projects to write about in this book.

Along with all these people, a book isn't worth without a reader. If you're reading this now I want to thank you and let you know that I've put a lot of effort into making something very useful for you and your projects.