Customer Reviews

Inside LightWave 3D 5.5

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you need/want to learn Lightwave quickly, this book may not be the best. The sections that cover planning and profesional issues are excellent. The explanations of software functions are OK, but don't expect to much detail into what each action you perform is doing. The tutorials vary in quality. The first few seem out of place. Most of them are lacking in description, and there are quite a few typographical errors and some missing files on the CD. I spend a lot of time reading manuals and doing tutorials for a number of software packages, and this book has some of the most poorly written and constructed I have ever seen. If you don't mind spending LOTS of extra time trying to work through where the authors (there are actually six of them) and editors totally screwed up, take the plunge. But I don't think this book will be worth the money unless it gets re-edited.

Half the time I'm going through this book, I'm enjoying and learning tons of stuff. However, the tutorials are written in a confusing manner, as the author leaves out steps that, while simple and basic, leave the rest of the tutorial in disarray, unless you figure out what was left out. He leaves out parameters to input, which foul the models, and leave one scratching their heads as to where they went wrong. I'm not saying that this is a bad book. It just needs an editor to go through it a second time and point out some glaring inconsistencies, omitted details and the such. After that, I would add at least two stars to my review.

I've read all the reviews you are reading now. After compare with other Lightwave 3D books, I bought this one, and at the same time I bought Inside Softimage. These two books are among the best book I've ever read (others are the Adobe Class in A book series)! One thing many people didn't tell you is that this book doesn't have colored pictures, which is kind hard to really see the differences of the rendered pictures. You will, however, learn a great deal of skills about lightwave 5.5. there are a lot of illustrations will help you go through each step. More than that, you will learn what Pro animators do (how to make money :) there are 2-3 typing (printing) errors of refering to the objects in the CD-ROM that came with this book. If you really want to learn lightwave, buy this book.

i bought this book in very high hopes of learning everything about lightwave. but i'm very disappointed. this book is very unclearly written and confusingly stuctured, both language-wise and content-wise. even though the tutorials were all very simple, the way it was articulated made them difficult to follow and succeed on the first try. i wish there was a better lightwave book.

Has good overall how-to-3D information (excellent information on texture mapping). But for those seeking more in-depth how-tos on modeling and layout and *why* certain things work, you won't find it here. Most example are very rote (do this, do this), and all examples use Lightwave's Numerics. Not a complete fault by itself, but this would be a better approach if there had been an example of units, and actual modeling within 3D space. Without this background, the tutorials give little take-away that you can apply to your own work.

I found this book almost the worst of the inside series. The tutorial are badly explained, they require a high knowledge of the software or at least such a confidence with the software that the person that has it wouldn't buy the book. I suggest to read carefully the manual that comes with lightwave then read the book. Beside this The book give good Ideas for video post effects and character modelling and animation. What is not well developed is the explanation of the modelling techniques and without modelling you won't have anything to map or animate or to adding effect to, things that are in most part well explained.What I am trying to say Mr Ablan is to focus a little bit more on lightwave's gui and modelling aspects, since they are the base of anything else.

The book fails to fully explain some minor steps that a beginner might wish to understand in more detail. Information such as "feel free to look at this image closer by pulling it off this Book's CD-ROM" does not help if you don't know the name of the image, nor in which folder it may be. Also some of the captions don't correspond with the images (e.g. page 68). If you have a lot of time on your hands you may well be able to guess the missing links, but you will probably find yourself doing the lessons over in the belief that you missed an important step, only to discover that it is missing from the book.

I have already got Dan's Power Guide, this is another fine addition to any Lightwave users library. Some of the topics are, by Dan's own admission, confusing, but this is still a book you can't do without if you want to learn more about LW. There is more here than just dealing with 5.5, a lot of the information and techniques are relevant even with 4.0 (which is what I had when I bought it). It's the concepts that are important. In a nutshell - buy it!

Great books except the book is in black and whit

I read a few books about modeling and Animating with Lightwave 5.5 And this book tops my scale. The Author uses clear and easy to understand Language. This books various Chapters take you trough all of the basic aspects of 3d modeling and animation in lightwave and more. It has many tutorials that take you step by step to high end animating and modeling. It even gives you tips on Planning, How to work and what you can aks of you're employer and what rights you have as an employe. The only advise i can give to you about this book is : BUY IT !!