LightWave 3D 8: 1001 Tips and Tricks - Wordware Publishing
by Rashad Redic

If you’re a Lightwave fan and you want to learn all the tips and tricks that make you a more effective artist what do you do? You could surf the web and find some tutorials; some tutorials here, some tutorials there, but what if you want over 1000 of the latest tips and tricks in one place in a format that doesn’t get viruses or require a power source? Then Lightwave 3D 1001 Tips and Tricks is the book you need to get.

The content is delivered in the interesting format of short easily digestible tips in all categories. The tips are offered up by a lot of the luminaries of the Lightwave community, including Timothy Albee, Nicholas Boughen, Jonny Gorden, Todd Grimes, Rob Powers and Larry Shultz to name just a few of the many contributing authors.

The concept behind the book is that you get 1001 easily digestible, production usuable tips that get straight to the point. This is the type of book for people with at least basic knowledge of Lightwave who want to skip the beginning stuff. I know they say the book is beginning to advanced, but I honestly think that if you don’t have at least a basic understanding of how to get around in Lightwave and do the simple things, you won’t be able to use this book to its full potential. For beginners, the Inside Lightwave series would probably be more useful.

The tips are divided into chapters, ranging from program setup, texturing, animating, special effects, rendering and compositing to name a few.Some of the tips are a page, maybe a page and a half if it’s got pictures, but most tips are only maybe a paragraph or two and this is the first beef I have with the structure of the book. As mentioned before, I don’t think this book is really for beginners. A lot of the tips tell you what to do but not how to do it; a level of knowledge is obviously assumed in a lot of cases. However, to make sure they can at least offer the book to beginners, a lot of tips are offered that I think dumb down the level of the book for me. These are obvious things that anyone who finds this book useful are already going to know, things like basic display settings, exporting uv’s, basic layer use, etc. Yes, they are beginners tips, but there arent enough of them to get someone up to speed on the software, so it kind of feels like a disservice to both beginners and intermediate/advanced users.

However, having said that, I’ve bought about 4 or 5 Lightwave books and this one is my favorite book so far, precisely because it gives it to you straight and to the point. Once you start really getting into the book, you are going to find some really good tips here. I’ve been using Lightwave for a long time and there are plenty of tips about things I didn’t know. In every single section I found some amazing information that inspires me to turn on Lightwave and give this knowledge a spin. Especially for the hobbiest or indie film maker, there are plenty of tips you can drop right into your pipeline and see immediate results. For anybody who knows Lightwave at least a little I’d say you should keep a copy of this book on the shelf and use it as an index of advanced techniques.

There are plenty of beginning and specialty Lightwave books designed to help people new to Lightwave get aqauinted. I’d like to see a refinement of the 1001 Tips and Tricks book as a soley intermediate/advanced book, by industry professionals for industry professionals and serious hobbyists. There is a big void here, and 1001 Tips and Tricks is the closest thing we have to filling it.

To sum it all up for me there are some shortcomings with the book, the chief thing being you should probably know Lightwave already to find this book as useful as it could be; I think it’s a little unfair to say this is a beginners book. However, for anyone that does know Lightwave, you’ll love the format of the book and how quickly you can gain some pretty important knowledge to apply to your projects. There really are some incredible tips there and the strength of the tips more than outweigh the shortcomings. A definite must buy.

Special Note: "Wordware Publishing has setup a coupon specially for CGFocus readers to receive a huge 40% off the retail price of the 1001 tips and tricks book. Wordware will also ship the book to anyone inside the cont US for free as well."

** In order to get the 40% OFF, you need to enter this coupon code: CGFOCUS **

To Purchase the book follow this link:
http://www.wordware.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=wwpub&Product_Code=1556220901