Customer Reviews

LightWave v9 Texturing (Wordware Game and Graphics Library)

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

 

 

This is written by Angel Nieves, Lightwave 8 texturing is written by Leigh van der Byl. The reason I brought lightwave 9 texturing is because it was by a different person, but I was disappointed because IT IS THE EXACT SAME BOOK WORD FOR WORD. Now, Mr. Nieves does have a chapter on the node editor, z-brush, and a few new tutorials. He does skip the g2 bit. The main meat of it is exactly lightwave 8 texturing. Mr. Nieves doesn't even acknowledge Mrs. van der Byl in his acknowledgments.

Save yourself money, if you have lightwave 8 texturing, go to borders or B&N skim the node editor chapter, and put ir back on self. If you don't have the older book, buy this book.

Thanks to the previous reviewer for bringing to light that this is the same book as the LW 8 version. The book isn't entirely useless--given how awful NewTek's documentation for Lightwave in general is, it might be a good thing to have. It offers useful explanations of every single parameter in the Surface Editor, which is good.

But any book on texturing in Lightwave should, in my opinion, provide a solid grounding in UV mapping, and this book is very weak in that regard--the relevant section only includes very simple tutorials, which are near-irrelevant from a practical standpoint. Worse, key steps in the UV-mapping process ("make the map fit the grid") are simply omitted here--I really doubt anyone could actually learn UV mapping from this book.

This might be useful as a reference volume if you can find it cheap, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone intending to learn texturing.

I haven't a good concept in texture about LW3D. This book can explained how the data come with the exact material you want to modeling.

Easy and interesting!!

It's cool.REally... Why i didn't rate this with 5 stars? Well... because Essentials is better than this one. (But Essentials touch everything, not only texturing like this one). And from Tetxturing it touches UV maps, Surface Editor, Edit Notes, and all the rest with examples of every Texturee that Lightwave have. I recomend this book. Really. It's good. (If you want to be good in Texturing of course...)

This book was a bit of a disappointment for me. I have read Essential Lightwave v9 and Lightwave v9 Lighting both put out by the same publisher, which were excellent books that went far and beyond above just covering to tools that Lightwave has to offer. The bulk of this book is spent simply taking you through all the settings in the texture and image editor, and then spends about 100 pages going through the settings on every single node in the node editor. I already spent 100 dollars to get a printed copy of the manual and now Angel Nieves is swiping $35 more to regurgitate the same material. The tutorials did prove to be somewhat beneficial, although I found there to be some key steps missing in some of them. This left me having to reverse engine his textures to figure out how to produce the desired texture. I'll admit that I am being a little hard on the book as it did do a great job of covering UV mapping and the creation of texture maps. If these are problem areas for yo then go ahead and grab this book. If you're looking to master the new node editor then read the manual and look elsewhere for a better resource.

I have been a Lightwave user since version 1.0. I took about a 5 year hiatus from using it every day due to my job requirements. I even use to teach Lightwave back in the early 90's.

Well that being said I now see that Lightwave has gained progress by leaps and bounds and I have been trying to catch up for about 2 years now. Texturing has always been my weak point in Lightwave and I am now using it to earn some income so I needed to get up to speed on texturing so I bought this book.

First problem I noticed is that all the pictures of screen grabs are so dark you can hardly make out what's on them. Many of the screens showing examples of settings can't even be read they are so dark and lacking contrast.

It also has comparison example pictures to show the difference from setting to setting but truth is many of them look identical since they are small and printed all in dark gray.

Now the explanations may make sense to someone up-to-speed on most of Lightwave's features but he does not give any real world examples of how or why settings do what they do. As I mentioned I am not an expert on surfacing but I am also not new to it and this book makes me feel lost which is the opposite of what a well written book should do.

Have I gained any knowledge from the book? Yes, but very little, even though I learn more and more on my own and web and then go back to the book for guidance. In my mind it's written more for a person with a coders or programmers mind rather than an artists mind.

End result is I wish I had never purchased this book. I would change that to less dislike if the pictures were readable.

I find it to be well written, easy to understand and has really helped me learn texturing the Lightwave-way. Recommended for intermediate users who knows how to model, and want to learn more.

Awesome Book! The best texture book you can get. Wish it had more colorful pages like the Maya books, however it does come with a CD with a color images and refernce. A GOOD BUY for all 3d levels Beginner-Advance

well written!