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This is one of the
books that should be on every serious LightWave
artist's bookshelf. The book covers just
about every aspect of light and how it relates to
the tools found in LightWave. The book is
written with LightWave 8.0 in mind but it can
certainly be used for any version of LightWave.
If you are only using an older version don't worry, you will
still learn a lot from this book.
As I've described
above the book is broken down into three
sections. The first section helps you to
"see" light and get a feel for the
properties of light. By learning the
properties of light it will make it easier for you
to analyze a scene and create lighting rigs that
better reflect real light. For this section
you won't really need to use LightWave at all,
rather you should be studying the environment
around you both indoors and outdoors.
The second section
gets into the heart of LightWave. In this
section you will spend a lot of time getting to
know all the various panels and controls that deal
with lighting in LightWave. If you don't
know anything about the lighting
"toolkit" in LightWave then this section
will quickly become indespensible. Nicholas
takes you through every panel and just about every
button and describes what it does and how it
works. Some sections are short but at least
give you a good starting point.
The last section of
the book is more of a hands on learning
approach. Through a variety of tutorials
Nicholas shows you how all the lights work and
what to use each light for. Nicholas sets up
a basic scene and then tries all the various
lighting components in the scene so you can get a
real feel for what each lighting setup can do for
you. Nicholas also discusses the use of
Radiosity and lets us in on a few tricks and
cheats of the trade.
The CD contains all
the images from the book but in colour. You
may want to view these as you read the book as the
colour images help explain the concepts in the
book a little more clearly. There is also a
sequence of tga images for an underwater tutorial
in the book.
Overall I was very
pleased with this book and learned a lot about how
the various lights in LightWave work. I
can't really find much wrong with this book so I
have to say that it would be an excellent buy for
just about any LightWave artist, especially the
beginner and intermediate user.
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