3D Realism Practical & Easy Workflows: Volume 1 (First Manual)

It's obvious that Mr Cardoso knows his subject. It's equally obvious that he knows how to capitalise on this knowledge. Largely by selling the likes of this to the unwary, one would presume. This publication is divided into three sections; pre production, production and post production.Pre Production.Sadly, this sets the tone for the rest of this book. There are some useful tips on setting up distributed bucket rendering and global perameters, for which one of the stars I awarded this effort was given. Unless you're working in the corporate world with silly budgets, you won't be thinking about a choice of render engines. You'll use what you're given/have/can afford. Using mood boards and reference photos? That's simply patronising. He goes on at length about basic set-up issues, like setting up your snaps and checking the origin point of incoming models (so that's where I've been going wrong all these years...). Anyone at basic City & Guilds level has this stuff filed away in their mental checklist. A lot of wasted words in a book aimed at intermediate to advanced users.In Rendering Workflow, he suggests setting up the Daylight System first (really?, setting the global perameters to draft (see my point?)and using a matte white material override for your initial lighting check. He does say you should turn off the glass material's cast shadows function, which is quite right, but doesn't say specifically that this material would otherwise remain untouched. How would the photons get into your scene? Nit picking of poor writing perhaps, and easily corrected, but this is a manual on professional workflows. He also instructs the unwary to turn off the Global Illumination to save render time. Not thought of creating a quick GI map then? Oh, and read up on Sky Portals. The point of the game at this stage is to test the basic interaction of daylight on your scene as a base-line from which to create your lighting rig. Some degree of accuracy would be nice, don't you think?ProductionAgain, there is some useful hints and tips here. Advice on setting up materials and tweaking the daylight system are useful and spot on. Then we're back to patronisation with basic advice on Final Gather by manipulating the FG variables under the Basic tab of the rollout.If you didn't know this stuff, you wouldn't have gotten this far. There are nuggets of gold here , hence the second star, but you sure have to dig!Post Production.This is where I threw in the towel. The final chapter is little more than Photoshop 101. I thought this was about consistantly creating beautiful renders. Anything can be made to look impressive with sufficient tweaking in an image editor, hence their popularity in general. I occasionally use Photoshop to loose artifacts too stubborn or inhierant to Max to render out. I, and most other Max/Maya users I know strive to create great renders. Post production image editing at this level is an indication of laziness/failure.What else is there to say? The book is supposedly "lavishly illustrated", which I'm sure was true when he viewed it on his iMac. Low resolution printing and poor quality paper makes most of the dialogue boxes unreadable, even with a magnifying glass. Nice (photoshopped?) renders of the scene at various stages of production though. Pity this isn't a tome for the coffee table. Spelling mistakes abound and grammatical errors persist throughout. Worse, this is simply a badly written book.I really want to like this book. The underlying premise is brilliant; there is a real need for a series of high-end guides to getting the best out of Max, Maya et al. The guy obviously knows his stuff, which makes this effort all the more galling. It is poorly written, poorly produced and completely unfocused. Whether you are a novice dipping a toe into 3d visualisation or a seasoned pro, there is little for you here which is useful in increasing quality or productivity that you couldn't find done better elswhere.Production.

I bought this manual book a while back but never got around to posting a comment.Having been in the business for over 8 years, I have personally found the book quite interesting and insightful!Furthermore, I thoroughly recommend it to any serious visualiser!!!The Authors's blog is also another good and reliable source of information!!!Keep up the good work J!!!!S C