Inside Lightwave 7

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
It's been 12 years since NewTek blew away the industry with the Amiga Video Toaster, a $5,000 broadcast-quality television production system that replaced hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, letting "ordinary" people make real TV for the first time. Newtek's never stopped pushing the envelope. Its flagship product, LightWave 3D, has grown from a Video Toaster software component to an amazingly full-featured 3D solution for broadcast, film, games, print, Web, industrial design -- even architecture.

The new LightWave 7 includes a raft of powerful new features, while also giving the LightWave interface a long-awaited streamlining. Simply put, it can do a whole lot more than its predecessors. But it's so multifaceted that you'll never be able to master its full power without expert help. Dan Ablan is the expert, and Inside LightWave 7 -- his fifth book on LightWave -- is his best yet.

Ablan founded AGA Studios, one of the nation's leading 3D animation studios and LightWave training facilities; he's also a columnist for NewTek Pro magazine. His book takes you farther into LightWave than any we've seen. What's more, it contains an entirely new collection of hands-on tutorials -- simply the best way to quickly familiarize yourself with LightWave 7's great new goodies.

He starts with an overview of what's new, including customizable and groupable interfaces that give you more control over the tools you're using; multiple viewport configurations; and the new Schematic View, which gives you a blueprint of your scenes, showing overall flow and making it easy to select the items you need to edit. It's more important than usual to carefully read Chapter 1 -- especially if you're upgrading from a version of LightWave older than Version 6, when LightWave's architecture was thoroughly overhauled.

Next, Ablan drills down into each key component of LightWave 7. You'll walk through the Surface Editor (including VIPER, LightWave's improved previewing tool); the Modeler; and Layout (including the new Spreadsheet Scene Manager, your new electronic "dope sheet"). There are detailed chapters on Graph Editor (once the black sheep of the LightWave family, but no more); and LightWave camera techniques -- from simple pans to dutch angles. Creating, building, and animating 3D scenes -- hands-on

Once you've mastered all this, Ablan moves on to the heart of the book: a project-based approach to creating, building, and animating 3D scenes. These chapters draw on Ablan's expertise as a LightWave trainer, and you'll find them utterly indispensable. There's in-depth coverage of lighting and atmospheres (including techniques for baking radiosity and caustics into UV-defined image maps); as well as architectural landscapes (including the creation of a 21st century skyscraper together with its surrounding environment). There's also a 110-page chapter on organic modeling, contributed by Stuart Aitken, who also created the outstanding image on the front cover of the book.

Ablan presents in-depth coverage of character construction, deformation, and motion (including an updated version of Stuart Aitken's excellent tutorial on designing human heads); inverse kinematics; and even expressions (he pretty well tames the math involved).

Among the new tools covered here: Sasquatch Lite, which lets you add fur, grass, or long hair to anything you can imagine; and Motion Mixer, which streamlines the creation of complex motions by allowing you to define libraries of motion characteristics and integrate them smoothly into any character. There's even a new guide to motion capture, the 3D representation of a live performance -- an entirely new way to create animation without tedious keyframing. While motion capture systems still run roughly $100K, relatively inexpensive prerecorded motion capture files can already be bought and imported into LightWave. It's not plug and play, but Ablan shows you how to achieve superb results.

Last but not least, Ablan has added a 70-page catalogue of LightWave Modeler and Layout plug-ins: what they do, and where to find them.

One thousand one hundred fifty pages strong, and containing a CD full of scene files and bonus resources, Inside LightWave 7 is the invaluable resource for LightWave 3D pros -- no matter what your goals, no matter what your experience. (Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. He served for nearly ten years as vice president of a New Jersey–based marketing company, where he supervised a wide range of graphics and web design projects. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.