|
If you are looking
for a book full of step by step tutorials then
this may not be the book for you. Leigh
points out early that she is not a fan of step by
step tutorials and instead approaches the art of
texturing in LightWave as more of a journey of
learning the tools and concepts. There are a
few step by step tutorials scattered throughout
the book and a few quick tutorials in the last
chapter but my best advice to you, the reader,
would be to pick and object from the LightWave
content files (the LightWave logo is a good
example as Leigh uses it often to illustrate her
points) and practice what the book is teaching.
The CD that comes with the book contains a folder
that has all the images and illustrations from the
book in colour. You will definitely need to
watch these images on your computer as you read
the book however there is a little problem that I
can help you overcome right away. The images
are fairly high resolution 32 bit tif
images. This is great but the alpha channel
portion of the 32 bit image can cause problems in
some image readers. I was using the built in
Windows XP image viewer because it is easy to use,
I can forward through a list of images easily and
the built in zoom is excellent however this
program clipped many of the images because of the
use of the alpha channel. For those who
aren't aware an alpha channel is basically a layer
built into a 32 bit image that can mask out
certain areas of the image. The alpha
channels in many of the images masked out much of
the image making it very difficult to read.
My advice here is to simply use a high quality
image viewer, photoshop or paint shop prowill do
perfectly here. You should be getting to
know one of these programs anyways so there you
have it.
The
book describes in a button by button account the
various panels and editors in LightWave that could
be associated with texturing and then expands on
these descriptions with processes and concepts of
texturing. In other words Leigh shows you an
area of an editor and then explains how to use
it. This is a book that is more geared to
the beginner rather than the intermediate user but
sometimes Leigh writes in a fashion that assumes
that you know a bit about texturing already so the
person who has just opened the LightWave box and
not read the manual may be more confused than
informed. Leigh stresses throughout the book
that she is building on the manual so read the
manual first then read this book. There
are a few things that I can recommend when reading
this book: First,
and this is never really pointed out within the
text, but many of the objects that Leigh refers to
in this book are covered in step by step
tutorials at the back of the book. It would
have been nice if these were referred to during
the course of the main text. For instance,
often there are pictures of wooden crates used to
illustrate points in the book but you don't find
out until you've finished the book that there is a
tutorial that covers creating wood on these crate
objects. Unless you've poked around the CD
before hand you might never learn until much later
that this object is on the CD for you to
experiment with. Quickly scan the last
chapter and the CD before reading the book so you
can follow along with Leigh. The step by
step tutorials are good so be sure to check those
out. Second,
as I've mentioned above already, view the images
from the CD while reading the book. If you
don't you are going to miss most of the points of
the book. Third,
practice along with Leigh as she shows you the
way. And keep practicing until you
understand. Overall
the quality of the writing is good but there were
a few things lacking that I wish were there.
I wish that there were a few more step by step
tutorials. Leigh makes it very clear that
there won't be a lot of these and she's lived up
to her word but I think it is a bit of a detriment
in this case. The big problem I had with the
tutorials that were included with the book is that
most of the tutorials are already finished for you
within the object and scene files. This was
very disappointing. Often I found myself
reading the tutorials and simply checking that
each step had, in fact, already been done for
me. This is very hands off and may cause
readers to be bored with the tutorials rather than
actually learning from them. Another
thing I found a little annoying was that many of
the objects that Leigh uses to illustrates various
points in the book are not included on the
CD. I would loved to have seen the object of
the bald headed guy on the CD so I can tear it
apart and see how it works. Better yet, I
would have loved to see a tutorial on how she
created the textures and actually apply it myself
to the head. Leigh does have several
tutorials on creating textures for a human head
but without the object to actually texture the
book becomes more "lecture" that it does
tutorial. The text is very informative but
without the hands on approach by the reader it
also can become a bit boring. I
also would liked to have seen some subjects
covered more in-depth. Animating textures,
for instance is a chapter only 2 pages long and
basically states what can be animated but not how
or why. This should probably not have become
its own chapter as it was very
disappointing. I have a feeling that the
book was to be only a set number of pages and
Leigh couldn't fit it all in which is a shame
because she could still cover more. |
