The Armored Horse in Europe

This one is pretty niche, but if you do any creature design it really comes in handy if you ever need to design period armor for an animal. You could easily reference the plate construction designs from a horse and fashion something for a new kind of animal. The book is paperback, around 70 pages, and in full color. The photographs are quite nice and often show closeups of  the ornate designs carved into the various metal plates.

Dover

This review is a bit different in that it isn’t about a specific book. There’s a publishing company called Dover that makes a butt load of really cool paperbacks on all things ornate. Next time you’re working on an architectural slab or designing a piece of jewelery for a character, reach for a Dover book. They’ve got all your filigree, motif, and pattern needs covered. I found these two in a local used book store and got them dirt cheap.

Battle

by R.G. Grant

I really can’t sing this book’s praises enough. If you’re looking for to a nice piece to add to your visual reference library this is it. It’s about 350 high quality, full-color pages that chronologically and succinctly cover everything from the battles of ancient Greece to modern warfare. The weapons depicted are usually annotated so you know what each part is called, which is nice so you can name things properly when you build them in 3D. I find myself thumbing through this thing all the time, just because it’s cool to look at.

The Art of Rigging (Volumes 1-3)

by Kiaran Ritchie

coming soon…

ZBrush Character Creation

by Scott Spencer

As soon as I saw Scott’s live demo at the Pixologic booth at Siggraph 2008, I knew I had to get this book. I was comfortable with the basic concepts of using ZBrush, but still foggy on some of the slightly more esoteric techniques used in character creation. Scott’s book really helped connect those dots for me. My one and only gripe with this book is that I wish he had been thorough enough to have someone else who is very familiar with ZBrush follow the tutorials in the book, from cover-to-cover, and do a little editorial proofing. I spotted a number of misnomers and hit a few snags where he was using assets that weren’t supplied on the accompanied DVD. These little goofs could potentially stop someone in their tracks while trying to follow along with the lessons in the book. Still, I highly recommend the book. The techniques, examples, videos, and assets you get are priceless to anyone wanting to push their understanding of ZBrush to the next level.

Modeling the Figure in Clay

by Bruno Lucchesi

This is a fantastic, visual guide for an artist seeking to infuse a better understanding of human anatomy into their sculpture. Lucchesi breaks the book down into two essential echorche-style tutorials: the male figure and the female figure. He outlines the process of developing an internal armature, adding the structures of the skeletal system, and building the forms of the muscles and other subcutaneous soft tissue, then adding skin, hair and other tertiary details.

Learning Autodesk Maya 8: Foundation

by Autodesk Maya Press

I’ve been trying, off and on, to learn Maya in my spare time. I lost my 3D virginity to 3ds max way back in the day, and I’ve been using LightWave at work for about three years, but I still feel like I ought to know Maya due to it’s large presence in the entertainment art industry. I picked up this book thinking it would be a practical way to get introduced to the UI and work flow. It is practical, but it’s also painfully boring. It’s essentially one robotic tutorial after another, and they’re all centered around the animated film, Open Season. I actually haven’t even finished this book. By the time I got about halfway through it, I was so sick of looking at Boog the bear I wanted to shoot him myself. I have a pretty short attention span, so I need learning materials to be engaging. I like the writing style to be a little conversational, and I like the examples in the book and what I’m creating as I follow along with lessons to be really cool. A proxy-level version of Boog isn’t cool, sorry. If you don’t mind droning along with flavorless tutorials, and you don’t care about the aesthetics of what you’re building, then this book should do a great job of introducing you to Maya. For my part, I’m going to keep looking.

The Art and Science of Digital Compositing

by Ron Brinkmann

coming soon…

Droidmaker

by Michael Rubin

This is such a cool book! I download and listen to fxpodcast from fxguide like a fiend even time they release a new episode. At one point they had a show where they interviewed Michael Rubin and talked to him about his book. I was amazed to learn that Ruben had made the effort to chronicle the events that made the visual effects industry what it is today. Reading this book opened my eyes to how rich and interesting a history visual effects has, and just how monumental a roll ILM played in its development. I work as a generalist at a small company myself. In addition to production, I’m in charge of the continual management and development of the companies render farm. So it was incredibly thrilling for me to read tales of ILM’s early days, rendering the Genesis sequence for Star Trek, doing all of that developmental work, and trying like hell to get it rendered in time to meet deadline. Even now, with software being as well developed as it is, and hardware as fast as it is, I can still relate. After all, as our tools allow us to do more, it’s only natural for us to push them to their limits. On a final note, if there is any question about the credibility of the information in this book, note on Amazon.com that the top book review is by Alvy Ray Smith himself, praising the book’s accuracy.

Realistic Image Synthesis Using Photon Mapping

by Henrik Wann Jensen

I consider myself an artist first and a technical type second. That said I have a special place in my heart for rendering and all the pain that can be involved in getting a great render. I had seen this book at my local Borders Books for a while, always coveting it due to it’s lofty and intellectual sounding title, and at the same time avoiding it because I assume it was over my head. Well eventually I broke down, bought it, and read it. Guess what. It was over my head. Well, not entirely. There are some math bits that I completely skipped (I’m painfully, embarrassingly bad at math), but beyond that Jensen actually did a decent job of communicating in a pretty approachable way. In the end I had a much better understanding of how photon maps work, and how monte carlo rendering differs from quasi-monte carlo rendering. In a round about kind of way, that knowledge even inspired me on how to solve a rendering problem I was having in a real life production scenario while under a tight deadline. That in itself makes the book worth the investment to me.

Painting With Light

by John Alton

Don’t be fooled by the black and white factor. When you draw a nude model with charcoal you’re dealing with tone – light and dark values. Sculpting works on much the same principles, in that you establish your blackest blacks and whitest whites, and everything else falls somewhere in between. I’m not trying to downplay the importance of understanding color theory – it is important – but it’s a whole other beast, and frankly I consider it the icing on the cake.  The information in this book is nothing short of invaluable to anyone looking to understand how to make their subject matter appear more engaging by means of lighting. Alton breaks down the concepts of light placement, use of gels and filters, and the psychological impact on your audience from various lighting treatments. The book is written from the perspective of a traditional gaffer, but the information is completely transferable to modern rendering software. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say it outperforms lighting books geared toward the digital artist, because it doesn’t get bogged down with the techie crap that computer books inadvertently become laden with.

Digital Lighting and Rendering

by Jeremy Birn

I’ve respected Jeremy’s contributions to the online CG community for years. Though I’ve never participated, I also enjoy watching the results of his Lighting Challenges. I had no hesitation in picking up a copy of his book on digital lighting. He covers a lot of ground in it, disusing everything from lighting jargon to color theory to digital-specific techniques like using negative intensity values to pull light away from specific areas. Birn does an excellent job of keeping his lessons digital, yet software nonspecific. He won’t tell you what radio button to enable or what spinner to dial up, but he will impart on you the essence of good lighting techniques so that you can approach your software of choice with good foundation knowledge, and make educated decisions. This review pertains to the first edition of this title. He’s currently on his second edition, but I have not read it.