Customer Reviews

Advanced 3D Photorealism Techniques

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

GOOD THINGS: This is a useful set of tutorial projects. Mr. Fleming walks you through a number of projects, showcasing modeling techniques such as modeling tiling chunks of geometry for foliage that can be cloned through the scene, and also showing common image clean-up techniques to process photographs into useful texture maps. This book would be just great for a beginning to intermediate Truespace or Lightwave user who wanted to see ways to put together more complex scenes.

BAD THINGS: The advertised "photorealism" isn't here - Mr. Fleming's renderings have a typical "3D Graphics" look: the shader development is weak (skipping basics such as making leaves translucent), the lighting ranges from bland to inadaquate, and the occasional characters (admitedly not the topic of the book) that Mr. Fleming adds to some of the scenes are stiff, lifeless, and amatuerish. If you were looking for truly seamless, production-quality photorealistic renderings, you'll have to look elsewhere.

This book is potentially useful for some beginners who are just learning to put together 3D scenes. However, the advice, techniques, and even the sample images all fall short of professional, and certainly are not very "advanced." The author doesn't have much new to say that hasn't been covered in other sources - I've recently read several other books on this topic that I liked better. My advice: Skip this mediocre title, and if you're looking for a truly advanced and innovative book on professional photo-realistic rendering techniques, consider "Digital Lighting & Rendering" by Jeremy Birn. The difference will be well worth the price!

hello,

i found some of the techniques to be useful for small scenes, but not at all useful for big 'architectural renderings' where clutter and chaos do not mesh well with architectural presentations. the organic modeling techniques were generally good for beginners.

however, i found the writing to be terrible, bill fleming spent half the pages describing these 'imaginary' creatures that were extremely painful to read through. i thought the book would be much better if bill had focused on the techniques rather than wasting page after page on the imaginary narrative of these little creatures.

i was interested in bill's other book on photorealism, but after reading this book, i am not so sure. although bill fleming spent alot time and effort in creating this book, the illustrations were in my opinion was fantasy-realistic, the imaginationary creatures used for the illustration were so 'un-believable' that perhaps the title might be changed to 'fantasy creatures toolkit'

sorry about the harsh criticism, but in my opinion, a poorly written book.

The organization is excellent as well as Bill guides you along the process with a few pleasant surprises along the way. The concepts are uncompromising. He emphasizes "realism." That can be attained with any 3D program if one heeds the lessons of this book. It is a launching pad for new ideas and ways to conceptualize to be as creative as the effort one puts in. I give this a thumbs up because nothing is hidden nor cryptic. It describes other 3D programs but the fundamentals are the same regardless of the 3D application used. This is a hidden gem and I suspect some seasoned 3D artists could benefit with a refreshing view. Bill hits a home run with this book. Clip maps, alpha maps, displacement maps are all discussed. I hope there will be a volume 2 to this.

I bought this book and was very dissapointed. The things Mr. Fleming calls photorealistic look like they all are made from the same type of plastic. I cannot call this photorealistic

Bill hits us once again with another fantastic 3D resource. Don't worry if you have the 3D Photorealistic Toolkit, this book follows on to show how to create natural environments and many other excellent tricks.

Written in Bill's unique and friendly style this is more like reading a novel than a user manual. Personally, I like this - it remains light, yet totally informative.

As a professional 3D guy, I am always amazed at how Bill manages to teach me something I didn't know.

Very highly recommended.

This goes into texturing, modeling, setting up scenes for natural environments and industrial environments...both of which are more complex in detail than the basic book in the series. Readable, useful and is NOT software specific. He teaches principles and the sorts of things you want to do and where to end up...NOT "press button B then..." which wouldn't be useful because I use entirely different software than what he does.

This book, like Bill's earlier one, deals mostly with detailing of models (geometry) only. It does not discuss materials in depth, or lighting, Global Illumination etc. So a large part of what makes scenes photrealistic is not touched upon. More importantly, his geometry detailing techniques will no doubt add a couple of zillion polygons. No discussion on that either- no scheme is presented to keep a count of polygons, or keep them within sensible limits.
Without proper lighting and materials, Bill does not really produce photorealistic results.
The description of imaginary worlds and creatures is unimaginative and tedious.
The underlying principles are noteworthy, but could be summarised in one page- which i think Bill *has* done: it's there somewhere on the net.

This book is great for intermedent 3d artists. I use lightwave3d and can say that if you have trouble building sences, this is the book for you. Bill not only explains how you do something, he explains why you need to do it. This makes for a better understanding, so that it can be applied to other projects easier.

Granted the term "photorealism" is perhaps a bit overused -- but characterizes well what Bill's artistic objectives are. This one of the books which I felt was most important in my moving solidly into the intermediate level of learning, and I still refer back to it from time to time.

In my experience, there are actually very few books on the market which really concentrate on surfacing knowledge, srategies, and techniques. Bill obviously used LightWave at that time, but he tries hard to keep things general -- and for the most part succeeds. Although some very useful modeling approaches are presented, they are directed specifically at making primarily image-mapped surfacing easier or more effective. It is primarily a surfacing book.

This book is, along with "Toolkit", a very useful addition to any serious 3D student's library and is my favorite among Bill's which I have read. I hope Bill reads this and is motivated to really dig into LightWave 6.x's excellent surfacing implementation and write a book on that, and there is really no good book out there at present on procedural surfacing -- probably because there you have to get program-specific.

Per a previous writer's reference to Jeremy Birn's book -- yes, it is excellent -- a must have, but covers different ground than this book. Another example of a must have for relative beginners (though I wouldn't recommend it until you have reached some level of competency with a decent 3D program) that will if studied thoroughly and applied in practice take you well beyond beginner.