Presents the latest upgrades, tips, tricks, and techniques in a step-by-step, practical approach that results in professional, high-quality projects, such as facial animation and walking. Steps you through how to create your own character animation demo reel. Discusses how to break into the character animation field, including how to get an interview with one of many animation studios.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
NewTek's sixth version of LightWave provides some powerful tools for the animator who needs to create objects that walk and talk and sing and dance--objects with character. Character Animation with LightWave 6 showcases these new features, plus, for the new user, the basics of character animation.
There are six major sections, broken down into 21 chapters, covering everything from modeling, texturing, and setup to animating and post-production compositing. There is a lot of information here, over 700 pages of it, which is good. But the book would be better if it contained more screen shots.
While the concept and execution of creating character animation in LightWave 6 is expertly explained, Character Animation with LightWave 6 rises above the crowd by including chapters about LightWave, storytelling through animation, and methods of production. In fact, the first part of the book (about 50 pages) is all about preproduction: story concept, script, storyboarding, and sound and timing issues.
Creating computer animation is easy. Creating computer animation that looks good is not, and the demands of computer character animation are enough to make any artist dizzy. Tools like LightWave, while equipped to meet the challenge, are often difficult to master without some experienced guidance. By investing the time to thoroughly read Character Animation with LightWave 6, you can climb the learning curve without succumbing to vertigo.
It's important to note that this book is an update to the previous edition. There is some new material to reflect the latest features of LightWave 6.5, but there may not be enough new material to merit buying this edition if you already own the previous one. --Mike Caputo
About the Author
Doug Kelly has written several books and articles, and has presented various seminars on computer graphics since 1992. His publications include Character Animation with Lightwave [6], Character Animation In Depth, Digital Compositing In Depth; as well as, contributing to the manuals for several 3D programs, written numerous articles for Keyframe and 3D Artist magazines, and his LENY '97 Character animation seminar CD-ROM. Doug is currently a freelance writer and animator and is editor of Keyframe Magazine.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
It's a good book to get, if ya don't have have the original,
By A Customer
This review is from: Character Animation with LightWave [6]: Challenge Your Creativity with the Artist's Choice for Character Animation (Paperback)
When I first read the there was going to be a character animation book for Lightwave 6 I was pretty exited. So, I ordered it as soon as it was available. When I recived it I was not to happy to find out that well over 60% of the book is just a reprinting of Kelly's previous 'Character Animation' book, which I already own. Don't get me wrong, It's a very solid book, but having to spend Fifty bucks for a few new chapters is pretty weak. If I knew that earlier, I would not have bought the book. But like I said, the book is good, mainly because it goes into alot character development, and preproduction, which is over looked by most other books. and preproduction.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't buy this! It's NOT about Character Animation!,
By "photonstudios" (New York City) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Character Animation with LightWave [6]: Challenge Your Creativity with the Artist's Choice for Character Animation (Paperback)
I have many LW books, and too was excited to see this one available (I actually bought it a yr ago and wanted to write a review as I was here). However this book does absolutely *nothing* in terms of teaching the necessities of Character Animation. NOTHING essential - No Character Rigging or techniques on Modelling for rigging, No Layout Setups of Rigs - NOTHING! Just a self indulgent chapter or two on how cool the author is for getting his own head scanned. And I can't believe the completely LAME and stupid waste of pages this guys goes to when he shows how to make a "Monster Eye" color map by stitching together 10 digital photos of closeups of his eye looking different directions in Photoshop. With the 2 CDs that come with this book you'd think he'd get something right. This Author has too much time on his hands and not enough LW chops - either that or he just has No idea as to what's important for Char Anim...- only LW 5 techniques. Skip this book!!!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Badly Named,
By
This review is from: Character Animation with LightWave [6]: Challenge Your Creativity with the Artist's Choice for Character Animation (Paperback)
The first 5 chapters of this book cover story writing and storyboarding. The premise behind this is that you can't design a character without having a story. The next few chapters dealt primarily with how you would use very expensive digitizing equipment (think laser telemetry), and how to touch up data artifacts. The last few chapters deal with outputting your project. I saw nothing on modeling and animation using Lightwave as the primary tool. I'll give away the big secret of the book right here: Build a clay model and photograph it.
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