Customer Reviews

LightWave 3D 8 Character Animation

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Finally, a comprehensive book on the art of character animation that goes beyond "push this button, now push that one".
With a background of traditional animation (like Brad "incredibles" Byrd and John "Pixar Honcho" Lassiter), Timothy Albee focuses on how to use the tools within Lightwave to create characters with personality. And it's the character's personality that makes an animation memorable. This is the best book on Character animtion using lightwave that I've seen, and a great resource for learning about the art of animation regardless of your tools of choice.

This book is 482 pages long, and the second half of it is not Lightwave-(or even 3D)-specific: general concepts of animation like follow-through, squash-and-stretch, etc. Everything in this section has been said before, and more eloquently, in many other books on the topic of animation.

The first half (which IS Lightwave-specific) is a step-by-step tutorial for building a rather esoteric IK rig for a humanoid character. I didn't find it helpful--nothing in the exercises seems designed to expand the reader's understanding, it's just a recipe for reconstructing Albee's rig. I suspect any reader without a previous understanding of how bones work in Lightwave will be completely frustrated.

If you're a beginner looking for a technical resource to animating in Lightwave, this is definitely *not* it. Any potential buyers should browse through a copy before buying this.

This book is very good for learning animation, regardless of the software package you use. The one think I must say is that its hard to just jump to a chapter and start from where you want. From chapter 9 on is what interested me the most, the book didn't make it easy to just pick up from there and run. Well written, and great to practice from.