My Recommendation: Unless you already own and are familiar with Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter (I'm guessing they're all from Adobe since the book isn't very specific), Hexasuper, and LightWave 3D, DON'T GET THIS BOOK!
In the beginning, I was very excited about getting this book; it looked promising for helping me bring my 2D characters into the realm of 3D. Or so I thought. It came in the mail and I immediately started flipping through. Things went downhill from there. What went wrong, you ask? Let me tell you...
My Beef: This book is terribly confusing for the beginner and assumes that the reader has already done stuff with these programs and has a good handle on them. It tells you what to do, but not necessarily how to do it. You are therefore not given a step-by-step process of how to get the same results as the examples in the book (which I was expecting and makes me very angry at not getting). Oh yeah, you have to already be pretty darn good at drawing too, which includes frontal views and profile (I don't know about you, but I verily suck at profiles).
Content Issues--Lack of Flow: This book gives four steps to making your "virtual beauty": (1) "Creating anime-style characters with Adobe Photoshop", (2) "Rendering 3D characters from 2D forms", (3) "Bringing your anime characters to life", and (4) "Creating virtual beauties with the latest technology from LightWave 3D." There is one example per step. This might have been fine, except that each step is written by a different person. This is a little confusing since the person writing the next step talks about some different things than the previous person, so there are a few gaps in-between each step that take a little resourcefullness to fill. Each person also has their own style and do things a little differently, which makes it unclear as to what to actually do or whether its okay to do either one (or whether it's possible to choose which one to do, given the information provided in the book).
On The Bright Side (there's a bright side?): As I've said, if you've already got a good grasp of how to do stuff, following their directions/guidelines shouldn't be all that bad (I say "shouldn't" since I haven't actually tried it yet...the Photoshop stuff wasn't too confusing though, I understood pretty well just by reading along). After each section there are also a collection of completed pictures/artwork that you can look at for design ideas or just 'cause they're pretty razz (I think one of the girls was looking at a porn magazine though eek What's up with that?).
My Rating (out of 5 stars):
Final Comments:
I'm looking at this from the perspective of someone who has a little familiarity with Adobe Photoshop, but not much else. If you own and are experienced with the programs this book uses, you might find this to be an awesome book, but since I don't/am not, I was pretty lost with this thing. Maybe someday I'll familiarize myself with these programs and then everything will be fine--I truly hope that day comes--but until then, I'm gonna say that "How to Create Virtual Beauties: Digital Manga Characters" just isn't worth buying.
In the beginning, I was very excited about getting this book; it looked promising for helping me bring my 2D characters into the realm of 3D. Or so I thought. It came in the mail and I immediately started flipping through. Things went downhill from there. What went wrong, you ask? Let me tell you...
My Beef: This book is terribly confusing for the beginner and assumes that the reader has already done stuff with these programs and has a good handle on them. It tells you what to do, but not necessarily how to do it. You are therefore not given a step-by-step process of how to get the same results as the examples in the book (which I was expecting and makes me very angry at not getting). Oh yeah, you have to already be pretty darn good at drawing too, which includes frontal views and profile (I don't know about you, but I verily suck at profiles).
Content Issues--Lack of Flow: This book gives four steps to making your "virtual beauty": (1) "Creating anime-style characters with Adobe Photoshop", (2) "Rendering 3D characters from 2D forms", (3) "Bringing your anime characters to life", and (4) "Creating virtual beauties with the latest technology from LightWave 3D." There is one example per step. This might have been fine, except that each step is written by a different person. This is a little confusing since the person writing the next step talks about some different things than the previous person, so there are a few gaps in-between each step that take a little resourcefullness to fill. Each person also has their own style and do things a little differently, which makes it unclear as to what to actually do or whether its okay to do either one (or whether it's possible to choose which one to do, given the information provided in the book).
On The Bright Side (there's a bright side?): As I've said, if you've already got a good grasp of how to do stuff, following their directions/guidelines shouldn't be all that bad (I say "shouldn't" since I haven't actually tried it yet...the Photoshop stuff wasn't too confusing though, I understood pretty well just by reading along). After each section there are also a collection of completed pictures/artwork that you can look at for design ideas or just 'cause they're pretty razz (I think one of the girls was looking at a porn magazine though eek What's up with that?).
My Rating (out of 5 stars):
Final Comments:
I'm looking at this from the perspective of someone who has a little familiarity with Adobe Photoshop, but not much else. If you own and are experienced with the programs this book uses, you might find this to be an awesome book, but since I don't/am not, I was pretty lost with this thing. Maybe someday I'll familiarize myself with these programs and then everything will be fine--I truly hope that day comes--but until then, I'm gonna say that "How to Create Virtual Beauties: Digital Manga Characters" just isn't worth buying.
...PEACE!