Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts

Anime Studio 6: The Official Guide Review

Anime Studio 6: The Official Guide
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Anime Studio 6: The Official Guide ReviewI'm actually using Anime Studio 7 but there was apparently no book available for that version. Although it's sad that there's no way to know what's changed in version 7, I've gotten about half way through the book and have found that the book applies quite well to version 7 as far as the overall operation and use of the program. The included disc has example files for each chapter and the hands on approach to working the examples is a great way to learn. Until a version 7 book arrives this is probably going to be the best book available for learning this program.Anime Studio 6: The Official Guide Overview

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Learning Maya 7: Foundation Review

Learning Maya 7: Foundation
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Learning Maya 7: Foundation ReviewFrom the days of Maya 1 all the way to 6.5, Alias has used basically the same tutorials every single time: Bouncing Ball, Jack-in-the-Box, Space Battle, Primitive Man, and Salty the Seal have been included in every foundation book, and while there will always be a special place for ol' Salty, a change was much needed. In this series, we finally get everything we wanted.
The entire Foundation book is based on the short film Blue, which means that you learn step by step how to create a very basic and simplified scene from the movie (including Blue himself, which I thought was pretty cool to say the least). All the basics are covered just as well as in the previous Foundation books, from Polygons to NURBS to dynamics and animation to MEL, all important topics are covered in detail. What makes this book stand out is how it will tell you step by step how to do something once, then cut you loose and let you experience it all by yourself, which is an excellent way to understand the material.
Finally, the icing on the cake, the extras. Not only does the CD contain videos of the more important lessons demonstrated plus all the saved completed projects and images, it comes with:
*Alias Sketchbook Pro (yes you have it forever, not a trial)
*The Short Film Blue and interview with the creator
*Extra lessons in both Sketchbook and basic texturing in Adobe Photoshop (or whatever paint program you have).
If you have get this book, then there is nothing to do but to go out and buy a tablet and stylus also. The basics of Sketchbook are taught in the very last chaper, something that is a must for storyboarding and sketching ideas, plus how to make your own textures and incorporate them back into Maya (something that was sorely lacking in previous books). If you are serious about taking on the beast that is Maya, then this book is a huge step in the right direction, you will come out with a thorough understanding of the basics of Maya, plus other tools to get you started making your own projects. This is a must have.Learning Maya 7: Foundation Overview

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ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide Review

ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide
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ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide ReviewFirst of all: I only have the ebook-version of this book, so I can't say much about the quality of the printed version. The ebook-version however is in full color and of high quality.
The book is seperated into 16 chapters, including one about the basic 3D terminology for people completely new to 3D and a longer one about getting started with the zBrush interface for people coming from other 3D software or zBrush versions prior 4. The explanation of 3D-Terminology is short but enough for a complete beginner to follow the book. The book is aimed at game-artists but the infos and techniques presented troughout the book could also be applied to other areas as well. Each chapter starts with a short summary of what will be done during that chapter, key concepts are explained before being used. If a new or advanced technique is used while creating one of the models, there is a short and very useful "What just happened?" section that explains everything in detail. Another great feature of the book are the "Pop Quizzes" that are scattered throughout the book, these contain questions regarding the techniques you have learned during the chapters. So you can try and test yourself!
There are 4 main models that are being made in this book: A spooky tree, a sci-fi drone(featured on the cover), a creature(with fur and accesoires) and a harvester ship. So there are two hard-surface models and two organic ones created, which is really a good choice to cover nearly all of zBrush's features. All of these models are of a high quality. These 4 models are used to introduce zSpheres & zSketch, organic & hard-surface sculpting techniques, polypainting, extracting maps, preparing a model for a game and many more. Also there are numerous small tipps and tricks that are a nice addition to your zBrush workflow. Aside from the tutorials there is a useful overview of the parts of a game-asset pipeline in a studio and for which stages zBrush could be used.
The weakest part of the book is the cover, because all of the three other models of the book look more advanced, but maybe that's just my opinion.
All in all is this a great book and I can only recommend it, not only beginners but everyone trying to sharpen his/her zBrush skills!ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide Overview

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Digital Art Masters: Volume 5 Review

Digital Art Masters: Volume 5
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Digital Art Masters: Volume 5 ReviewDigital Art Masters: Volume 5 is another great compilation of top quality art and insightful tutorials. If you have earlier volumes, you pretty much expected that. I've a wonderful time going through this thick 288-page book.
This time, art is categorised into 5 sections: Sci-Fi, Scene, Fantasy, Character and Cartoon. As usual, you see work created from all sorts of medium (2D & 3D), across a variety of art genre gravitating towards concept art. There are 3D modeling on different subjects, digital and background painting and many more.
The featured illustrations and galleries are beautiful and detailed. I can't begin to imagine the amount of time spent to create some of these inspiring illustrations, especially so when some of them are just personal projects.
There's plenty to learn from as there are to see. The artists share their techniques as they go through their process of creating the featured illustrations. The book is filled with all sorts of tips, ranging from matte painting, scene composition to even portrait drawing.
You can also visit the publisher's website for some free video tutorials.
Volume 5 is a great addition. Highly recommended to 3D modelers, digital painting artists and art lovers.
(There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)Digital Art Masters: Volume 5 Overview

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The Natural Way to Paint: Rendering the Figure in Watercolor Simply and Beautifully Review

The Natural Way to Paint: Rendering the Figure in Watercolor Simply and Beautifully
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The Natural Way to Paint: Rendering the Figure in Watercolor Simply and Beautifully Reviewthis wonderful book demystifies the paintng of figures with watercolors. it is broken up into these sections: drawing, paints and materials, rendering the figure in three dimensions, features, integrating figure and background, and composition. throughout the book there are step by step lessons which are thorough and challenging. furthermore, the book is lovely to behold and the writer has a fabulous sense of humor! i spent my summer on the vineyard obsessed with this book and i've only just begun--it's packed! does anyone know where i can find this guy?The Natural Way to Paint: Rendering the Figure in Watercolor Simply and Beautifully Overview

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How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5: The Art of Design and Animation Review

How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5: The Art of Design and Animation
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How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5: The Art of Design and Animation ReviewHow to Cheat in Flash CS5 is the kind of book that can help you out if you are unsure about something for a project you are working on. This book will keep you busy for plenty of hours if you follow every chapter with the actual lesson on the cd that comes with it which is packed will flash extensions, example files, and demos of Flash CS5's powerful new features. This book is designed to let you know which version of flash is required to do the exercise. It will either have a flash cs3, cs4, or cs5 icon. So what does that mean? Simple. It means you need Flash CS5 to do everything in the book and why wouldn't you want to have the latest version of flash when it has so much more features to offer then any other version.
So the book is as follows:
Chapter 1: Design Styles
Chapter 2: Transformation and Distortion
Chapter 3: Masking
Chapter 4: Motion Techniques
Chapter 5: Character Animation
Chapter 6: Flash to Video
Chapter 7: Animation Examples
Chapter 8: Working With Sound
Chapter 9: Working With Video
Chapter 10: Interactivity
Chapter 11: Extending Flash
Chapter 12: What's New In Flash CS5
-----------My Thoughts on Each Chapter---------------
Chapter 1: Design Styles
This is great for anyone who never used flash alot of basic drawing and navigation but a real jewel in this chapter is the explanation of how to use the art deco brush, the 3d brush.
Chapter 2: Transformation and Distortion
Squash and stretch is something every animator needs to learn, 3d rotation shows how advanced flash has become, warping is a great tool for quick manipulation of an animation.
Chapter 3: Masking
This chapter has alot of fun feather and blurring masking techniques including making a flag wave in the wind.
Chapter 4: Motion Techniques
This has an in depth look at the motion editor, bones, 3d motion tweens, and adding shadows to your animation, as well as blurring animation tricks. Needless to say this is a very important chapter.
Chapter 5: Character Animation
Simple walk cycles, advanced walk cycles, looping backgrounds, this chapter has alot of useful exercises in it which I encourage anyone who is serious about animation to learn. It also has a great audio lip syncing exercise to get your vocals to sync with your animation which is just as important as a good cartoon itself.
Chapter 6: Flash to Video
CS5 video templates explained. How to get you animation ready for the big screen which it hopefully ends up on including hdtv. Which colors are safe to use. How to export you flash document into quicktime and other formats.
Chapter 7: Animation Examples
How to make a complex animation such as a sausage grinder in CS5 from drawing the shapes to knowing which symbols to group together to the animation itself. How to use the bone tool and spray brush in unison great technique when you have to animation several small objects that are a like. Cool page turn trick, how to create fire, snow, rain, steam, fireworks, and much more.
Chapter 8: Working With Sound
Like I said before sound is just as important as your animation. Different sound applications explained. Dynamic as3 sounds to add life to your animation and user interactivity.
Chapter 9: Working With Video
How to import video in every version of flash. A short but very useful chapter.
Chapter 10: Interactivity
This is for the the real coders out there. As3 and As2 actionscript covered. This chapter basically dives deep into user interactivity. Dragging objects, pausing the timeline, loading images, toggling sound on or off, and event handling.
Chapter 11: Extending Flash
Crazy amount of flash extensions which will make you fall in love with the best program even more. There are plenty of extension packed on the cd to make your workflow ten times as fast for those tedious tasks that we hate to sit through. You can make your own desktop app with flash jester and create some sweet 3d effects with swift 3d.
Chapter 12: What's New In Flash CS5
Publishing your flash product for the iphone in no time. The spring tool explained and it shows you just how important this tool really is. Text layout framework is a easy way to layout multiple paragraphs that are linked to each other.
My overall view:
I don't need any other book when it comes to animating in flash. Everything I need is literally in this book. I don't understand something I can look at the actual file on the cd. Great reference and hours of fun.
What I want in future books by Chris Georgenes:
I want to see more animation examples like panning with the camera and how to put together a short and then animate it from start to finish. More advanced animation tutorials such as morphing objects, and compiling a full character, 360 turns, and jumping animation.How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5: The Art of Design and Animation Overview

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Character Development in Blender 2.5 Review

Character Development in Blender 2.5
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Character Development in Blender 2.5 ReviewThis book is an invaluable resource. As a long time 3d artist, I have picked up little tricks here and there that really bring pieces together well. Jonathan manages to cover these little tricks and more, assisting even the beginner 3D artist in creating a piece of art that feels well polished. A great book and a great read. Also, their website (blendercookie.com) is another amazing resource. Check it out.
The only con I have is the pictures in the book are kind of dark, but the included dvd remedies that nicely.Character Development in Blender 2.5 Overview

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Character Modeling with Maya and ZBrush: Professional polygonal modeling techniques Review

Character Modeling with Maya and ZBrush: Professional polygonal modeling techniques
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Character Modeling with Maya and ZBrush: Professional polygonal modeling techniques ReviewThis is the first book I found that deals with ZBrush. As a new user of the program, I found this book invaluable in getting started with ZBrush. The tutorials are well laid out and there are tons of supplemental videos to help, too. I've been using Maya for a while, mainly for vehicle modeling, and I found this foray into organic character modeling to be very helpful in building my skills.Character Modeling with Maya and ZBrush: Professional polygonal modeling techniques Overview

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ZBrush Digital Sculpting Human Anatomy Review

ZBrush Digital Sculpting Human Anatomy
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ZBrush Digital Sculpting Human Anatomy ReviewThis book is an excellent follow up to all previous zbrush books. Why?, two reasons...One, it refers to zbrush version 3.5 which has some major changes from previous zbrush versions. But the greatest joy is in following the tutorial of a "realistic hero" character. My lady friend always asks me about all other zbrush books..."why do all the characters look ugly?" the answer is simple. It's far easier to create an alien or an ogre. But now Scott Spencer enables us non academically educated artists to create a somewhat life-like character. This is no easy task, but Mr. Spencer enables even a non artist like myself to do so. I no longer have to create aliens and ogres and can actually create a character that is aesthetic to the layperson's eye! BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF ZBRUSH IS A MUST! So keep that in mind. But once you understand the zbrush interface and you are comfortable with the basic standard, clay, inflate, and flatten brushes, you will love this book. Hopefully, the next version will be of a "life-like" female superhero.
THIS BOOK IS A MUST HAVE along with "The Essential" by an author who now advocates mudbox. ZSpheres have come a long way with v.3.5 zspheres2 so he might regret leaving zbrush. BTW...There is no info on zsketching in this new Scott Spencer book, but nevertheless, your skills will grow leaps and bounds as an artist (digital sculpturist) as he does a great job explaining gesture and form as well as detail.ZBrush Digital Sculpting Human Anatomy Overview

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Introducing ZBrush 4 Review

Introducing ZBrush 4
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Introducing ZBrush 4 ReviewThe depth of information contained in this book combined with the ease of its delivery are a must have for any Zbrush user. I've been intimidated with the Zbrush interface at times; clicking, searching and fumbling for the right buttons only to find myself having lost what little progress I had. This book clearly lays out step by step how to do various sculpting procedures with maximum efficiency for great results. I rely heavily on Zbrush at my workplace, Gentle Giant studios. Since each project is different from the last, it is important to adapt quickly to the needs of the project. I've had to rely on this book to guide me through tasks such as ZProjecting, Zsphere base mesh creation and mesh decimation, to name a few. This book has made my work flow faster, which in turn, make my bosses happier. You will not regret the purchase of this book!Introducing ZBrush 4 Overview

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