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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An oddball collection of topics, September 14, 2007
This review is from: Digital Photography for 3D Imaging and Animation (Paperback)
I'm somewhat of a noob in 3d modelling and animation, and so this book really interested me. I was hoping to learn how to better use photography to do things like create effective reference images, textures, normal maps, bump maps, displacement maps, and such.
After reading through most of the book, I'm pretty disappointed. While the book does cover such topics, I feel that it gives those topics a pretty superficial treatment, and the focus of the book seems to be on other, what I'd consider, "oddball topics".
The book devotes a lot of time covering digital photography in general. It does this fairly well, but honestly, a book like "Real World Digital Photography" does that much better.
The book also has large sections where it goes into great detail into how to create a 3d slideshow, and another on how to create a digital collage using After Effects. While these topics are kind of interesting, honestly, how often are you going to do something like that?
The book is kind of an interesting read, but after reading it I'm wondering who the intended audience for it actually is. Certainly not 3d animators or modelers like the title and the description of the book seem to indicate.
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15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bad HDRI coverage, maybe OK for beginners, March 3, 2007
This review is from: Digital Photography for 3D Imaging and Animation (Paperback)
This is an important topic. The publisher should have found a more experienced author to write this book!
The coverage of HDRI imaging was full of mistakes. In a step-by-step tutorial, the author makes every mistake in the book: he focuses his camera wrong, he changes the f-stop between bracketed exposures even though this will change the camera's DOF and mess up the alignment of images, in assembling his High Dymanic Range Images with Adobe Photoshop PS2 he advises readers to change modes from HDRI to 16 bit and back, without mentioning that this means he is no longer creating a High Dymanic Range Image. The author doesn't seem to notice that the series of bungling mistakes he has made hasn't produced a HDRI map suitable for image based lighting, and instead acts as if he has achieved highly realistic results.
The author's mis-adventures photographing a Christmas Tree ball in his back yard to make HDRI are only one chapter in this book. He also attempts to make texture maps out of photographs (he gets to the color maps, doesn't go much further into how to derive bump or specular or other maps based on the color.) The book is also full of "filler" chapters that would only be useful to a beginner first using a computer. There's a chapter on image management, showing how you can use a program like iPhoto to organize your pictures, and explaining the difference between compressed and uncompressed image files.
Overall there's not much for a dedicated 3D artist in this book, although some beginners might find some of it useful.
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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent & Informative, March 16, 2007
This review is from: Digital Photography for 3D Imaging and Animation (Paperback)
I was hesitant to get this book after reading the one review posted. But instead I got the book anyway. I have to say that the information is excellent. I've worked in 3D for a while, using Maya and Cinema 4D, but had not explored the use of digital photography to the fullest extent. I had emailed Dan Ablan and he replied right away. He told me this book was about ideas and that it helps bridge the gap between photography and 3D, two fields he's worked in for over a decade. He was right and I found that his example photos were outstanding and use of them even better. This book covers managing files which is a big deal as you start taking more shots such as textures and image maps. It covers how to create panoramas in more than one application, and it covers hdri and as Dan shows, works great in modo. I'm new to modo, but the project was cool. I was surprised that the book even covered image modeling using image modeler from [...]and then there was the after effects tutorial creating a heavily layered, animated montage all from photos using masks and keys and blending. I liked the use of 3D for animated photo slideshows and image mapping ideas.
What really surprised me the most was that even though the tutorial are geared towards beginners it has helped my 3D work immensely. What's cool is that Dan included hours of video training tutorials on the book's DVD to help you learn more and there's tons of sample images to work with and free demo software.
Top notch book!
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