Customer Reviews

Character Modeling with Maya and ZBrush: Professional polygonal modeling techniques

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

 

 

This is the first book I found that deals with ZBrush. As a new user of the program, I found this book invaluable in getting started with ZBrush. The tutorials are well laid out and there are tons of supplemental videos to help, too. I've been using Maya for a while, mainly for vehicle modeling, and I found this foray into organic character modeling to be very helpful in building my skills.

I found this book to be one of the best intermediate books out there for both Maya and Z-Brush. Be sure to read the recommendations at the beginning of the book. Great stuff with easy to read tips that can be applied immediately. There are lots of things about this book that I like better than the Autodesk books. This gets to the point quicker, instead of spinning you around with overview or "Before you begin.." or "Conventions used in this book.." type of junk. If you've made it through one of the beginning Autodesk books and want to expand out a little, this book works great.

This is a great book for creating characters in maya and refining them in zbrush. It is written by a pro (the guy was Lead 3D Technical Artist at LucasArts) so he definitely knows what he's talking about. He covers the whole art pipeline process and gives a great overview, but also goes into great detail. It's the best 3D book I own, and I own many!

The book arrives and I'm hoping that it will shed some light on the workflow between Maya and Zbrush, with displacement and normals and so forth. I was hoping it would give me some insight to Zbrush and how to use it professionally. Instead.. I really have no words for how bad this book is. It is written for Maya beginners, but it also demands that you know stuff already. It goes in to detail on some things, and then skips other things completely. it is full of pictures, so that the book seems bigger and more pro, but alas, it shines through that this book is is not worth the paper it was printed on. I work with Maya every day professionally. Instead, I would recommend you to do a search for "video tutorial" or something like that on Google or Youtube.

I tried atleast 4 different task from this book and none of them worked. I don't think this guy has ever used the applications he is writing about. This book isn't for intermediates or begginners, I think it's for experts who stepped away from 3D for awhile and need a quick reminder course on how to do things. The author didn't draw me into the text, just frustrated me and cut me off with a "see ya sucker". If you like to figure things out on your own or buy books that sit on your bookshelf, this book might be what your looking for. I may not have gone into enough detail about why this book sucks, but the author didn't go into enough accurate detail to make this book not suck.