Customer Reviews

LightWave 6.5 Magic with CDROM (Magic (New Riders))

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is a book that presents 21 different lightwave 6.5 techniques to acheive a particular effect or animation. The approach is a snappy, no-nonsense presentation of how to acheive the aim of each chapter - lean and mean presented in a glossy designer page layout.

The book will be very comfortable for those with a reasonable grasp of lightwave, less so for those that expect to be led by the hand in drawn out tutorial style (as some people might expect from Dan's other books).

The book was in production when Newtek restyled some of the lightwave user interface, some have commented that this invalidates the book. It doesn't. A technique is a technique - if you are put off because a button has moved on a menu, you are wasting your time with lightwave anyway.

The 21 techniques vary from texturing effects, animation techniques, explosions and composting - too many to mention individually. It's a snappy shortcut reference to getting a particular job done.

If you are a competent hobbyist, then this is a great leg up. If you are paid for your work and can use any of these techniques, you've saved yourself time and money.

A great resource at just over $2 a chapter. The author provides great support via the web for all his books.

Catchy title eh? I bought this book recently and even though I am new to both the world of 3D art and animation as well as Lightwave, I found it to be an easy/enjoyable read. The tutorials, while simple gave me an excellent grasp of some techniques I can now employ in other ideas which working through the book has spurred. I highly recommend this book to users of Lightwave at any skill level!

I finally received my copy of this book just this week. Although I haven't had a chance to really get into the tutorials, I've read it all week on the bus while going into work and only have 2 things really to make points on:

(a) Educational! Its great to get insight into plugins and features of Lightwave that I would otherwise never have realised were there unless someone showed me them! A bit of everything, including a nice overview of Expressions!

(b) Inspirational! This book really does inspire you to take what each tutorial covers and expand upon it. Each tutorial gives some pointers where to go next, and point out some good ideas how to use the tutorial techniques.

After reading the tutorials on Fixed Front Projection Mapping, I wanted to take the next bus home to have a play! The Expressions section got me thinking about how I could automate some of my projects (and make simple ones even better!) and the texture motion being used on the zoom and focus of a camera to get that 'amateur' handycam look were great ideas that sparked the imagination!

Great book! Thanks again to all authors! :)

I'm a new user to Lightwave and frustrated by the lack of current documentation with Lightwave (Only PDF manual available for current version and many menus have changed from the version which is the manual they provide in print form.). So I thought this book would be a good learning experience. As of this date, it is the only 6.5 (current version) book I could find. My experience is that you can follow the receipes in this book and create what they show - marching spiders and swirling clouds -- BUT, this book does a poor job at explaining what you are doing. The recepies containe premodled elements (you only learn how to control the spiders legs... not model spiders.) And most of the settings are not explained. So you end up creating the project, but not really learning. As I was setting the numerous controls on the cloud project, I was wondering what, exactly, I was doing. This book was little help. If you are a beginner and are only buying one or two books, I would recommend waiting until Sept/Oct of 2001 to buy real 6.5 version books with more instructional information.

There are books, and then there are books. I bought Lightwave 6.5 Magic ready to work and was instead invited to dream. Much to my suprise, in tonality and visually, this book is different fron Dan's last two masterpieces, geared it seems to nurturing imaginative thought along with his dependable how-to education. LW Magic retains Dan's strong sense of command-language encouragement, is packed with valuable information, tutorials, and practical descriptions, but emphasizes associated possibilities, the open-ended projects a spark for the imagination presented in practical concrete form. Visually rich, its physicality is a delight. The actual text is minimalist, highly distilled and effective, the blank spaces eloquent, and the quotes, delightful...it takes backbone to present a philosophic idea so understatedly (that Lightwave is ultimately about imagination) and in Dan's case, real backbone to depart from a best-selling formula, but beyond the truth of how-to lies the greater part of 3D, which is the magic. This book is a key to the universe, everything else is simply construction. Anybody whining about buttons, boy, you've missed the point.

I have to disagree with the negative reviews. This book delivers what it promises. It is a cookbook for some neat effects that goes beyond Inside Lightwave 6. The interface concerns are moot as you can easily switch from L6.5 to L6 to L5.6 interface layouts in L6.5, that is stated clearly in the opening of the book. This book is a launchpad for ideas and exploration, not a ticket to Lightwave mastery. It never claims to be anything else. The example scenes on the book are great for tinkering, they can take you beyond the tutorials if you invest some time.

In addition of my first review i have to correct my "totally useless". This book seems to be quite useful for beginners in the 3d world and i think it also will give this group some experience of magic. My first review was the sound of highend operators critics which is appropriate in a matrix like production environment, but not in public - sorry.

As a compositing artist, I have great use for particles and the like. I don't really do much modeling or animation, however I do like to learn it all. I had high hopes for this book, because LW6.5 (and now 7) have such impressive upgrades to their particles that I just had to jump right in.

I guess the first big dissapointment was how lame the sample videos were. Nothing makes me lose faith in how good I can do by watching a sad sack video. The quality looked like first year student work.

The follower tutorial was great, but a tutorial on how the spider was actually rigged would have made it all the better. Rigging is a real mystery to a great many people, especially multi-legged creatures.

The expressions tutorial was probably my biggest letdown. Nothing makes a tutorial more frustrating than printing errors in the text, so suddenly you're up against a brick wall and not completing it. I got halfway through it, and just wanted to learn more about expressions when it stops. Worse, it mentions more interesting things expressions can do, but fails to explain how.

The faked fur renderer was a far better tutorial when published in Newtekniques magazine a year or so ago- it looked better and what is going on was well explained... in this book, it comes across as being half done.

In defense of the book however, there are many many tutorials in there, and quite a wide variety. The book is in full colour, which is a real bonus, and the format of the book actually allows you to have the pages lay open and flat- quite a nice treat.

If only a tutorial book would come out that really explains WHY you do things the way you do, so one can actually LEARN how to apply the techniques, instead of merely doing someone else's project again.

In all, the book is pretty good, just lacking completion to tutorials.

I think tutorial books should focus on one thing: expressions- particles- modeling- rigging- animation, whatever... just stick to one skill. Having books try to cover it all is not working. I'd rather buy ten really well written books on seperate subjects than buy ten different books and get about 5 pages worth out of each book.

The tutorials in this book provide good starting points for creating a pretty good variety of special effects in LW6.5.

The tutorials are easy to follow, provided that the reader is already familiar with how to work with LW; this book definitely doesn't cover the basics, nor was it intended to.

My only complaint is that, in spite of being a 6.5 book, the screenshots all use 6.0 menu layouts, which is a little frustrating.

Great tips in tricks in this book. Each excercise can be modified to suite your own needs in your own projects. The book is definitely not for the beginner, but if you are a seasoned user looking to expand your knowledge of LightWave 6.x then I highly reccommed it! Also check out Inside LightWave 6.