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Inside LightWave 7 (With CD-ROM)
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Author: Dan Ablan
List Price: $59.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0735711348
Publisher: New Riders (28 December, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 35,969
Average Customer Rating: 4.58 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
A fairly good book, but shouldn't be the only one you have
While still trying to appreciate the huge task that the author undertook, I must say for those who consider buying the book to be aware that there are quite a few errors in the exercises that take some time to figure out (trial and error) for a LW newbie like me. At least I couldn't understand quite clearly how to get around LW's user interface just by following the explanations in the book.The explanations about Lighting and Rendering are good, I didn't find any satisfactory coverage regarding texturing though. The best that I could do in that regard is just following the examples without knowing the "why" and consequently I don't think I have a thorough understanding to do any original texturing. Maybe there's assumptions that the target audience already know about texturing and the author just provided additional tips. I would recommend to buy the DVD tutorial "Get Into Seven" to help you get started, some of the explanations there are much better to understand and can be combined with this book to help you learn LW. And with the basic skill from the DVD, the material in the book is making much more sense and you would even be able to spot the errors and correct them. I hope all the errors are fixed and more explanations would be included in the "Inside Lightwave 8" edition.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Fair book, but not for the beginner
I was new to Lightwave when I purchased this book. On the surface it looked like it covers a good deal of material and it does. However, I take issue with the way some of it is presented. To the beginner, it felt like, "getting a drink from a fire hose." I was looking for a few simple examples to learn the basics from and gradually work to larger tutorials. I didn't find too much of that here. The first parts of the book jumped into texturing objects, before it really explained how to make the object in the first place. (i.e. modeling) This made it difficult to build objects that you could experiment on using different textures. The modeling section jumped right into designing a large city block or an entire human head at the start. It never really demonstrated how to do "simple" objects from start to finish. The closest it came to that delt with making subsections of skyscrapers that didn't look like anything until the entire building was completed. It would have been nice to do a few simple models before trying to build complex items like a city or human head. If you worked slowly through every step of the tutorials, you will eventually learn quite a bit. Unfortunately, by that time you've spent many, many hours before you have anything to show for the effort. You don't feel like you accomplish very much in the process. You can skip sections of the tutorials, but if you do, you will miss a trick or key that may not be repeated elsewhere.
The book has a good deal of tricks and information in it, but I still had to keep jumping between it and the Newtek manual before I was able to understand some sections.
Overall, it does cover a very large amount of modeling and texturing. I like that, but I didn't like how it didn't ramp up to "large projects." Finally, I would like to have seen a little more information on actually using Lightwave to animate with. It goes into overwhelming detail on modeling and texturing, but very little on making the model actually animate.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Best there is for Lightwave. Period
I've read several books on various 3d packages. I prefer Lightwave as my tool of choice, and Dan Ablan's books are my single point for learning and reference on Lightwave. He covers all basics (which was fairly important to me) and then attacks even the advanced features.Coverage starts with learning the interfaces in Lightwave, he explained it in a way that now makes most of the interface intuitive to me. The detail he goes into in describing modeling a human head is incredible. I cannot wait for his latest Lightwave 8 edition. Highly recommended.
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