Customer Reviews

XSI Illuminated: Foundation 2

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

 

 

Softimage XSI 2.0 is a good program, but its Help menu needs help. For beginners trying to learn about this program is hard because it doesn't teach a person to do basic things like rotate, pan, zoom, and other functions. This books is thin (229 pages), but it's packed with informations like moving objects around (rotate, zoom, pan, etc.), polygon modeling like (a plate and a jellyfish), path animation, hierarchy groupings, deformations, layers, lighting and renderings. The disadvantage of this book is that it doesn't have any color pictures. For example, the example picture showing lighting and shading is only in black and white. Second, there aren't many print screen pictures that show which menu or control panel the author is talking about. Also some of the arrows showing the hierarchy of items are very blurry. Don't forget to buy the second book (XSI Illuminated: Character Animation). Overall, I would highly recommend this book for beginners to start learning about XSI.

As a computer book author myself (one of which, New Masters of Flash, is a previous 'Computer Book Of The Year' at Amazon), and reader of many books on digital media, I can truly say that this book is outstanding.

The book literally flew me through subjects that previously felt like I was trying to run through treacle when reading other 3D books. The authors make it all seem that easy and sensible.

Highly recommended.

Also worth noting is that the second part of the Mesmer XSI course (XSI illuminated:Character)is available as a freely downloadable pdf at mesmer.com. I pointed this fact out to a peer (who happens to be a digital effects trainer at Disney) and he was also as gobsmacked as I was at the quality of the tutorials in that book. Needless to say, I have also bought a hardcopy version of the XSI:Character book!

Stop wondering if the XSI illuminated books are better than the other XSI books... click that buy button now!

S

The book that ships is for XSI 4, not an earlier version as implied by the name. The 4.0 Edition is copyrighted in May, 2004. I'm not sure why Mesmer hasn't got around to fixing this issue.

I had a little experience with Strata CX, an entry level but good 3D CG package, before I purchased XSI 4 Foundation at SIGGRAPH 2004 in LA. The HTML manual that comes with XSI is very good but it really helps to have a textbook type approach for learning the basics. That is what this book does, and it does it very well. I've read a huge number of computer books on many subjects in the past 20+ years and this one rates five stars. It isn't a thick critter like what you find for Flash, Photoshop, and that genre, but it gets you started with some nice tutorials and covers a healthy variety of topics.

- jim