Customer Reviews

Inspired 3D Lighting & Compositing

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

 

 

I would have given this book less stars if I could. It had nothing to offer to me as an animator who wished to learn more about lighting. I went through the first 50 pages without learning anything new or useful at all. Yes, lots of colorful pictures, but they are either stills from big Hollywood productions which have little if anything at all to do with the text or are specificaly prepared for the book which look so bad you don't even want to read through the text to see how they were made. There are many interviews, but you can find similar ones for free on internet. Digital Lighting & Rendering by Jeremy Birn might be more expensive but is a far far better book than this one.

When I first got this book, I looked through all the pages, and there was a colour picture at least once every few pages - and many came from famous ILM films such as Jurrasic Park. I looked forward to reading about how these images were lit or rendered or composited -- but (sadly) the text had very little if anything to say about the specific shots, the images often were a tangent to the main topic of the text, where it seemed as if it were a stretch to work in a mention of the image. I don't blaim the companies for wanting to keep everything about their work a secret, but without any specifics the general discussions in this book were essentially unillustrated and not very useful. I wish they would publish a more technical and specific book about lighting and rendering and compositing for visual-effects film-making!

While this book has some good information, it has one major (and I mean Major) flaw. This book is about CG lighting and yet no effort was put into the reproduction of the images in it. Virtually every rendered 3D image printed in this book is so dark that you can't see any of the lighting features the author is talking about in those images (I really don't know why they were included at all). I am not kidding! Please, before you buy this book, go to a bookstore that has a copy and look at the images in it and you will see what I mean.

My other issue is with this whole series of books. They all have a general overview of CG animation that takes up the first 25% of each book and it's virtually identical in each book. This is undoubtedly just the publisher/editors attempt to pad these books out and make them feel as though they are thick and comprehensive. I mean, Come on! if I'm buying a book about CG lighting or Character Rigging, I think it's pretty safe to assume I already have a general understanding of the basics of CG animation. I won't be buying any more books in this series, and I wouldn't recommend them.

I dont know, it had a lot of inserts by 'industry pros', but it is more of the same info everyone else writes. Good for the Mom or Dad of someone entering the field, but not much help to an actual artist. The book avoids actual tutorials and rewrites the basics from the software manual. However, it does put information into a smaller condense nugget than the software manual . . . but manuals are free with the software.

I've now read through a small pile of CG books and I found that my self-studies would not have been complete without Parrish's excellent book. I wish I discovered it earlier when I first started struggling with 3D modeling and rendering software. I would recommend this as the first book a beginner in computer graphics should read; but also worth reading if you are a bit farther down the road.

This book is not tutorial based, and although many may say that it goes over the basics, its actually more of a personal enrichment process. Don't buy this book if you're a newbie and are just looking for tutorials to carry out. This book serves to make you wiser in the CG career and understand how things work, great reading material.
My only crit is that I don't like the horizontal style of the book, when you're sitting down to read it, its a pain because its so wide! I would have very much preffered a vertical book as this one being horizontal makes it easy for the covers to bend permanently, which is not pretty if you like to take good care of your books like I do.

Not only is this the best text on lighting and comp I've ever read, it's the ONLY one that comes from an industry professional who's body of work speaks for itself. It's about time a comprehensive approach surfaced on this subject which a lot of times can make or break your project. The interviews with Dennis Muren and Pixar's Lighting Supervisor are alone worth the price of this book. Anyone serious about lighting should have this resource on their shelf.