Inside Lightwave 7
By Dan Ablan et al.

First of all, the unexpected size of the book, considering the author, told me that I was getting something special here, and not just a larger slice of some tree. Inside Lightwave 7 weighs-in at a hefty 1160 pages, compared to 863 pages for Inside Lightwave 6.

Dan Ablan pulled out all of the stops and made an excellent book better. He went beyond a simple rewrite of his previous book in that he invited some outstanding and well-known Lightwave artists to co-author and contribute entire chapters to this book and thus presents the reader with an even more interesting and valuable learning experience. Some of these people, such as Stuart Aitken, Jarrod Davis, and his technical editor, Douglas Nakakihara, were already part of the team for Inside Lightwave 6.

To me it was important to be able to transition smoothly from my projects, started in Inside Lightwave 6, to Inside Lightwave 7. No hunting around, no being lost, because the same chapters address approximately the same subject areas and in some cases identical projects, right down to the numbering of illustrations.

While Dan Ablan’s books are not for the complete novice, they do not require a huge amount of software knowledge to accomplish the included tutorials and projects. However, they do not, and surely are not intended to replace the Lightwave manuals.

Part I – Getting Started with Lightwave 7

The first part of Inside Lightwave 7 is dedicated to a highly detailed introduction and description of the functions and operational environment of Lightwave 7. The very thorough chapters introduce Lightwave 7 and then proceed chapter by chapter to address the most important components of the software. An entire chapter is dedicated to each the major Lightwave 7 features, such as the Surface Editor, the Modeler, the Layout, the Graph Editor, and Lightwave 7 Cameras, each liberally illustrated with screen grabs.

Part II – A Project-Based Approach to Creating and Building 3D Scenes

As in previous editions, Inside Lightwave 7 Part II is project-based and a great hands-on way to learn lighting – including radiosity, scene building, organic modeling, and character construction. Co-author Randy Sharp, formerly of Foundation Imaging, wrote Chapter 8 - Architectural Environments and the included skyscraper design project. Co-author Stuart Aitken, designer of both of the covers of Inside Lightwave 6, and Inside Lightwave 7, wrote the Organic Modeling Chapter 10. The latter now freshly reworked for Lightwave 7.

Part III – A Project-Based Approach to Animating Scenes

In this building-block designed book, the reader is now taken, using the product of the organic modeling tutorials, into the world of character animation, deformations, morphing, and creating a talking character. The next chapter addresses Inverse Kinematics (IK) and progresses from motivating a simple robotic arm to applying IK to a human riding a motorcycle. Chapters 14 and 15 are written by Jarrod Davis. Jarrod still does work at Foundation Imaging, where he was involved with, among other projects, Roughnecks, Max Steel, and Dan Dare, as well as Star Trek Voyager. Chapters 14 and 15 of Inside Lightwave 7 deal with Animation Expressions and Procedural Expression. These skills are presented by this master of his craft and demonstrate how to function in a production environment simplifying and organizing major animation tasks. Chapter 16 examines the new Lightwave 7 Motion Mixer and its application to animations. The final chapter in Part III addresses what may be for many aspiring professionals a bread-and-butter issue: Broadcast Animation.

Part IV – Animation Post and Effects

The chapters in Part IV offer an in-depth look at Compositing and Rendering and the various tools that facilitate these tasks. From here it is on to the exciting FX features of particles and particle animation as well as fur animation, now that Sasquatch (Lite) is a part of Lightwave 7. Chapter 21 features the Motion Designer with its interesting cloth and object collision project.

Part V – Appendices

The final part of Inside Lightwave 7 contains a chapter on Motion Capture and chapters on Plug-ins and Reference Materials and Tools. And then there is the CD. For Inside Lightwave 7 the CD content was reallocated. Instead of containing a lot of guest artist’s objects and scenes, there was a welcome change and addition. The CD now contains full-sized, full-color screen-capture images of all of the illustrations in Inside Lightwave 7, which greatly enhance the familiar project files and objects folder. It is a trade-off I whole-heartedly support.

Far from stilted and dry, this is an easy to read and follow project-based book that is as enjoyable to read as it is to work from. Additionally, throughout the book, the reader will discover highlighted boxes that contain Tips and Notes to further enhance the real-life usefulness of the text. Inside Lightwave 7 is well written and sprinkled with ideas and suggestions for the reader to expand beyond the boundaries of the tutorials and the text. If one’s budget permitted only one book to be purchased for Lightwave 7, Dan Ablan’s Inside Lightwave 7 would have to be the one

In closing I’d like to bring up one more reason for buying Inside Lightwave 7 for those of us who have not yet upgraded our software to LW7. Once I upgraded from LW 6 to LW 6.5b I had found the Inside Lightwave 6 book somewhat wanting. With that in mind, I viewed Inside Lightwave 7 as a potentially far more useful project guide for me and was not disappointed. So, in my opinion, even for those who are still using LW 6.5b, this will be a very useful purchase, as well as a nice way to pre-familiarize themselves with LW 7.

Buy at Inside Lightwave 7 at Amazon.com