Customer Reviews

Character Animation In Depth: The Complete Expert's Guide to Professional Character Animation

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

 

 

I have mixed feelings with this book. It covers a lot of information, which is good, but i often get lost because there aren't enough pictures to go along with the explanations. Also, many techniques are software specific, and many step-by-step tutorials involve software that you may not have. Many questions that i have are left unanswered... but then again no book can answer everyone's questions. If it did, it would be 20,000 pages! The character setup section mainly deals with Hash's Animation:Master. Little good that does people who use more industry standard software like MAX or Softimage. A related book that i recommend is George Maestri's Digital Character Animation... it covers much of the same material, is much easier to read, and actually IS software independant!

character animators are small community in india and lack of dedicated schools and studios does not help us one bit,in such a scenerio doug kelly's book on character animation helped me a lot.good information on hash animation master and softimage.excellent reading material for the beginner and intermediate level.all in all superb reading material

Although this book covers a large amount of computer animation, including many different techniques, I believe that it aims to please too many people. Of the 1000+ pages, very few of them offer any practical advice on character animation, instead pointing the reader to the extensive bibliography. Most of the intermediate-advanced readers the book is supposedly recommended for will find nothing new. There is far too much irrelevant material (for example, there are two chapters on cyberscans, which the author denounces as useless for character animation!?), which would have been better replaced with more examples of modelling etc. I feel that for a book titled Character Animation, there is only a small amount of material on the subject. Having said that, it may provide an eye-opener for non-professionals or beginners to the field. My biggest annoyance with this book is with its claim to be software-independant. The author has obviously spent too much time with SoftImage, and hence uses many jargon terms derived from that software (such as 'tags') which will undoubtedly confuse many readers. And I'm not even going to go into the format of the excercises... Having read several books on the subject, I would recommend George Meastri's Digital Character animation instead.

The Structure of the book is very complicated, it's as if constructed from many different articles written for some 3D application. And many of the information is very software specific. There are many examples but not a single complete advanced tutorial. Many chapters copied from Doug's old book LW5.0 character animation. There are many other books on Character Animation much better than this.1 out of 5.

Overall this was a very helpful book. My main "problem" with this book is the author's attempt to cover so many applications so specifically. As a Lightwave user, I am still left in the dark about Lightwave's bones in character animation; which is one of the main reasons I purchased the book. Only the very basic setup was covered as a tutorial. How about something more complex such as a "hand" with limited ranges, fall-offs and strengths...? The version 5.0 and 5.6 is jumped between frequently...then Hash...then Softimage.....Max.... For character animation theory this is a good book but if you are trying to actually be a character animator using only one of the apps (such as Lightwave), then I suggest doing alot more reading from other books and web tutorials. For the price this book is good but no great wonder. I did learn from it; only not as much as I thought I would have when I bought it.

This book goes way beyond the title of Character Animation. It is really and in depth book. From pre-production to textures to animation, to post production and setting up your own shop. This book covers it all. There are very detailed tutorials from several different animation programs. If you are planning to purchase an animation program this is the book to buy first. If you have your program already this is a very good book to help you get out a finished product. Comes with a CD that is loaded with examples and demo programs.

It is a good book, perhaps the best of its type, and it could certainly be much better, in ways other readers have pointed out. But it has one fatal flaw for a book that should be computer platform agnostic - the CD-ROM is Windows only. What about all the Mac and UNIX people in the 3D Industry?

~970 Pages, first a bit of a shock. The contents of the book is very broad, it isnt concentrated on one program, which is interesting to get the jist of character animation. Not a book for pirate software owners (consult your software manual, and get to know your 3D Software first before reading this book). All in all very informative.

I must admit that I had high hopes for this book, but in the end it was a letdown. The book spreads itself too thin and thus results in users with a specific program not learning very much. Your best bet is to buy a book that is targeted to the program you are using, otherwise you'll find yourself wasting a lot of time and finding out that more than half the things in the book don't apply to your particular software.

This text includes a section by setup expert Steph Greenberg that is so useful, some friends and I are requiring it as a text for our volunteer, on-line course. The course covers construction and IK/constraints setup of a human model for animation, using Hash's Animation:Master 98.