Exploring LightWave 3D is a hefty tome that promises to be everything for everyone.
Unfortunately, it falls far short of this somewhat lofty goal. Incorrectly documented beginning tutorials, missing scene and image files, and unchallenging advanced lessons all combine to turn a potentially valuable book into a questionable investment.
The included floppy disk is a High Density PC formatted floppy disk, so many Amiga owners will be unable to read the disk. (This is curious, since the disk is only half full - a more logical choice would have been to distribute it in a LoDensity PC floppy, so that all LightWave owners could read the files.) The objects and scenes included on the disk are not setup to be loaded from the floppy, nor do they use the new ‘Content Directory’ feature of LightWave 4.0, so you’ll have manually hunt down the image maps and objects. (Unfortunately, the image maps included on the disk don’t match the names requested, so you’ll have to guess at the correct image maps....)
There are 17 chapters spread across five sections. The first section has three chapters. Chapter one details installation for a variety of platforms. This pretty much duplicates the ‘Systems Guide and Installation’ manual included with LightWave 4.0. The second chapter describes the basic concepts of 3D modeling, and ends with a subsection about animation techniques that seems totally out of place in a discussion of 3D model basics. The third chapter introduces us to the basics of LightWave. This begins with a list of system requirements - handy, since we had already installed the software two chapters ago.....
Section two, the ‘Quickstart’ section, jumps into the basics of object and scene creation with a hodge podge of projects. Chapter four teaches the basics of lathing by having you build a pawn. Then you use a Boolean operation to turn it into a Bishop. Chapter five is the ‘Quickstart Layout’ chapter - two different scenes are created, both use objects included _only_ in the LightWave 4.0 upgrade. There were a number of erroneous images in this chapter, but this was mainly because the lights were not the type described in the instructions - though in one case, a procedural texture was given an incorrect value. The finished scene was supposed to be on the companion disk, but coudn’t be found - not good for the first tutorial in the book.
The second project in chapter five was to animate a hovercraft lifting off the ground, and accelerating. It was sorely lacking in companion images, and really would have been a good time to discuss the value of the motion graph editor. Unfortunately, it appears that there is absolutely no coverage of the motion graph editor, short of one paragraph that merely describes the button!
In my opinion, the motion graph editor is one of the most important tools available, and is indispensable when setting up finely tuned, realistic motion paths for objects and the camera. I find it _particularly_ amazing that many pages of the book are devoted to the importance of proper camera and object motion, yet no attention is paid to this valuable tool.
Section three ‘Exploring LightWave’ is just what it says. Chapters six and seven go into the details of Layout and Modeler respectively. The ensuing chapters discuss all the options available in the light, camera, and effects control panels. The section ends with a short chapter on the ‘advanced techniques’ of Inverse Kinematics, and spline patching.
While it claims to offer ‘advanced modeling & rendering techniques’, there is little in this book that the advanced (much less intermediate) modeler can gain from. There are only two ‘advanced’ projects, and even those are poorly documented. In both tutorials, the author shows a distressing inability to use the tools efficiently.
The first tutorial, discussing Inverse Kinematics, begins with a clumsy example of building a hierarchical object out of boxes. After eight pages of bad modeling techniques, the author finally gets around to working in Layout. (Unfortunately, the screen shots begin to dry up, so you have to rely on the ‘step-by-step’ written instructions.)
The final tutorial about spline patching completely misses the basic concepts that make spline patching such an important tool to modelers. The goal is to create a chess piece - a knight specifically. Rather than use spline curves to model the peaks and valleys of the horses head, the author begins with an outline of the head. The next steps show a confused and obtuse method for creating the side of the knight. Rather than focus on the natural contours of a knight’s body, the author has you manually create a grid of points which are then moved around by hand to create the contours of the horse’s body. (Rather than use splines, this method is best suited for metaforming - much faster!) Once you’ve built this big mesh of splines, here are the detailed instructions given for finessing the curvature of the knight’s body: (Typed _exactly_ as written.)"Now would also be a good time to select points in the center of the knights body and pull them out to give the knights body some needed contours."
A sample of the finished object should accompany this review. (Note the single ear which covers the entire top of the head.)
Following the ‘advanced’ tutorials are a couple of chapters about lighting and camera techniques that condense the finer points of college textbooks on cinematography to a few pages.
The last section contains appendices and an index.
This is a book that really needed to be proofread before publication. The most glaring error is the uniform misuse of "your" instead of the contraction "you’re". Also, in many cases, the word ‘to’ is incorrectly used when ‘too’ should have been used. While these may seem petty complaints, the book was very hard to read because of the author’s incorrect use of grammar.
Often, simple explanations became adventures in circumlocution. There’s a fascinating little section called ‘selection states and "the power of influence"’. An entire page is devoted to explaining how LightWave’s selection tool acts like most other selector tools. Here is an example of how the author chose to clarify this mystery:
- Exploring LightWave 3D! pg3-18
The above text is ©1995
Erik Flom. No portion may be reproduced without my express permission.