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3-D Human Modeling and Animation, Second Edition
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Author: Peter Ratner
List Price: $55.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0471215481
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (18 April, 2003)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 7,127
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
Reviews are pointless
Yup, review of books online is a lost cause. How many times have I bought a book which looked interesting and substantial only to end up with sloppy editing, crappy tutorials, poor writing, uninspiring artwork, and a huge dollar sign on its dust jacket that made me lose a quarter of my arm and leg?More often than once. That was the case with this book. Lessons learned? Reading reviews online is a tricky affair. Usually, the attacks are personal. They may find the book hogwash but it might just be the right one for you. Others might even have a violent reaction to the book not because it was really a trashy book to begin with but only because the reviewer misses the whole point. Imagine a raffia hobbyist reacting to a book on Javascript for Rocket Scientists and Engineers. So no matter how advanced information technology has become there is still no better substitute for fondling the physical diomensions of a book in your local bookstore and reading it at length to have a better grasp of its usability. I know it is hard but walking is such a great exercise it will strengthen your cardiac muscles and save you hours of writing acerbic reviews of books which did not meet your expectations. May I also remind you this book is a rehash of an old material the author has written almost eight years ago. Nothing much has improved. The author obviously is finding a way to resell an old book by coming up with a new cover but the change is clearly a cosmetic one as the contents are still MEDIOCRE. You are better off buying Jason Osipa's book. I have it and it is brilliant both for beginners and professionals. And, please, stay away from all Bill Fleming books on modelling and texturing digital characters. His models look so plasticky. With CGI written all over its pixels. I bought them a few years ago when I was still a fresh-faced newbie. Now they are under my bed gathering molds with my old copies of National Geographic. I hope I helped you save some money. Support your jobless but very talented friends with it.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Disappointing at best, misleading at worst
The cover of this book suggests that the book will help you model and animate human characters with the same subtlety and expression shown in the picture. It turns out that apart from being a 3D human character, the cover shot is unrelated to the content. The book is a clumsy and uninspired walkthrough of basic construction techniques and theory, apparently aimed at the complete novice who won't know that the examples are poor.The book takes you through the steps required to build and animate perfunctory human models, with some related theoretical instruction, but the examples are amateurish, and the reasoning behind the instruction isn't well-supported or explained. Techniques specific to the building of a human character aren't adequately addressed -- in fact, the book begins with the assumption that you've never modeled anything in 3D at all, and gives brief overviews of modelling techniques better illuminated elsewhere. Brief examples of storyboards, posing, making hair, and other ideas tangential to the key concepts are given, but even these are unsatisfactory. One example summed it up for me-- to show how intial sketches may lead to a more detailed storyboard, a series of frames from the animation clearly rendered with a "cel shader" was photoshopped onto an array of pseudo-randomly rotated rectangles, with faux-paper wrinkles and drop shadows added, to make them look like a number of drawings on cocktail napkins. As in this example, nowhere in the book was any artistic sense or grasp of theory shown, things which I feel are essential to human animation, and I would guess that the result of studying this book would be more of the same Bryce and Poser cookie-cutter creativity in abundance online. Perhaps the book may be useful for someone who has never taken an art class, drawn a figure, or used a 3D program before, but it's disappointing to someone looking for genuine insight into what may be the trickiest field in art.
Rating: 1 out of 5
To vague
I bought this book after reading all the reviews thinking it would help me finally make a good human character. Sadly it didn't. The section on modeling the simply stuff like the knife and cow are pretty good but when you get to the modeling of a human part it becomes so vague you have to guess at everything and the picture don't even help that much. You start of with the box and make some cuts then all the sudden it says make a general shape of the head with no help at all. He could have atleast showed it lined up with a referance picture. The guy that said the animations were poor on the cd was right. I mean body parts passing through each other is pretty bad. I know they are student animations but come on do you think thats usefully to me? Another thing that bothers me is the cover. Anyone that looks at this would think wow I can make something like that after reading this book but the fact is that model is created by the great Steven Stahlberg who is as far as I'm concerned the best human modeler out there (He should write a book). Look at the cover model by Steven and compare it to Peters enough said.
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