Game Design Books

This is an update of a classic book on procedural texturing and modeling by the main founders of the field. The book presents lengthy discussions of classical procedural texturing using various noise functions of the sort originated by Ken Perlin (one of the authors). It discusses newer texturing techniques such as cellular texturing, which can be used, for example, to create convincing stone patterns. Other chapters focus on animating solid textures (e.g. marble forming, volumetric gasses, etc.), fractal terrain generation, and tips for utilizing existing graphics APIs and hardware for realtime procedural texturing. This is only a sampling of the topics covered.

Code samples in C and RenderMan are given throughout, although most algorithms are given in only one of those languages. This can be a bit of a problem, as many readers will probably not have access to a RenderMan implementation. Nevertheless, it is not too difficult to translate the RenderMan code into C code in many instances.

The biggest drawback to this book is its lack of rigorous technical coverage. The decision to omit many mathematical details was a conscious choice on the part of the authors. Instead the book is mostly prose discussion of the techniques and the coarse descriptions of the underlying concepts. Although the prose is mostly clear, many times I felt myself in need of more specific, technical details. Fortunately, the book's authors are the primary researchers in this field and most of the ideas in the book have been published in academic journals. It was very easy to supplement the book with these primary sources.

Overall I found this to be a very interesting and useful book, with many algorithms essentially ready-to-run right out of the book. It would get five stars, except for the lack of technical and mathematical details mentioned above. Every serious worker in graphics needs to have this book on their shelf. I use mine often.

I'm using this book because I use a shading programing (shaderlab pro 2)language for truespace that is derivitive of renderman. In that sense it was helpfull becuase it filled in the gaps of the poor docs that came with shaderlab. It took me from scratch to a basic understanding of procedural coding. Oddly, the one thing it didn't include that I assumed would be there was a discussion of the worelynoise function and feature points. This was totally strange because one of the authors was worely! Even stranger was that "advanced renderman" did do a decent discussion of it, so now I'll have to buy that! Some people might want to check out "advanced renderman" because it's less intense mathematically and gives more basic insight to renderman usage.

This book has several serious problems.

The most glaring is that a significant number of the examples are coded in the "Renderman shading language". This language serves, in this book, to hide detail, detail specifically related to producing textures. Of course, if you know the language, you're fine - but most won't know the language and so this is a grievous error.

By way of welcome contrast, other examples in this same book are instead presented as C code fragments or functions. That's just the ticket - using a broadly known, freely available, relatively low-level language with no recourse to unknown hidden graphics functionality is precisely the way to go when explaining ideas in the domain of those this book is intended to convey.

The second problem is one of content. While being concise to the level of a math text is not desirable, this book contains a very sparse field of useful information considering the number of pages. The margins are too wide, the text too large, the form factor of the book too small, and the authors too wordy to possibly convey a good basis for texturing in general - it is a broad and fascinating field, touched only in the briefest and most unsatisfying manner by this book.

I do take issue with the reviewer who complained about the exposition on how to make a brick texture; that area of the text, while it may be already quite familiar to many who are interested in texturing, contains precisely the level of detail that needs to pervade a book of this type, and detail about steps that underly critical basic texturing ideas. Without understanding those basic texturing tools, a novice misses the first step on the stairs and fall on their face. The problem is, this approach is not consistent for more complex ideas in this volume, few as those actually are.

The book is entitled "Texturing and Modeling". While there is a moderate amount of texturing information in it, whatever you do, don't get it if modeling is your goal. It is very nearly devoid of modeling information, and what there is (smoke, a planet simulation, a few other items) is very basic indeed.

Finally, as a general critique, the authors (all of them) need to learn the basic idea that when presenting a function in any language to a new audience, one should precisely define the domain (and rationale) of the inputs and outputs of the function. As an example, one might encode the function for Perlin noise, and have no idea whatsoever as to what values to feed it to get particular types of results. For those of us who can read and understand what the function is actually doing (which is esoteric, make no mistake about it) the answers will eventually be illuminated by careful study of the function. However, this is very advanced material, and I am absolutely certain that many readers will be unable to figure out how to effectively use this function without a great deal of trial and error. You can also read that as "wasting a great deal of their time." That is because they won't be learning anything that could not have been conveyed by the author(s) in a single short paragraph of domain information.

In summary:

The 2 stars is because I didn't think this was a very good book. On the other hand, it is one of the very few books that deals with the subject at all, and for that reason, you should definitely own it if textures are an interest of yours.

If you're newly interested in textures, this will give you a basis for further exploration. It won't give you a cookbook by any means.

If you're looking for cookbook and "how to" approaches, get on the web and the newsgroups.

Finally, if you're considering writing a good book about creating textures, by all means, please do. The world needs a good one: this most definitely isn't it. I'd be delighted to be one of the first owners of your new book.

This book is for experienced programmers who want to understand the fundamentals of procedural graphics generation. This book is not for artists looking for practical applications of procedural texturing and modeling concepts.

The authors cover a very large array of topics in the field, including many pertinent code examples, mostly in the RenderMan shading language. It focuses on the groundwork of the field from the first texture maps in the 70's onward, with a cursory mention of the state of the art at the time of publication.

Representative text:

"The particular kind of fractal we're building is called fractional Brownian motion, or fBm for short. fBm is characterized by its power spectrum, which charts exactly how amplitude relates to frequency. Oops! Pardon me - I'll knock off the math."

"Long ago I gave this idea the wonderfully unpretentious - not! - moniker "generalized Impressionistic texture," or GIT for short. (We need more TLAs - threeletter acronyms.) The GIT matrix generator system takes the form of a time-varying swarm of color samples in a color space, usually the RGB color cube."

This book has five authors, and that is exactly the way it is written. It changes character practically at the beginning of every chapter. It is obvious that the authors have a great deal of knowledge of procedural textures and modeling, however, it is all just lumped together into one big hard-to-sift-through mountain. You will have to do a great deal of work to extract algorithms from this book. Only because there is good information there do I give this book three stars instead of two. Truthfully, it is probably a 2.5 star book.

An example of the authors' inconsistent narrative style is this: Chapter two goes into great detail on the obvious - clamping, antialiasing, and the brick wall texture. In chapter 15 on "Fractal Solid Textures", the authors brush over the complex issue of how to produce fire, water, wind, and rocky terrains. Also, the vast majority of the time, rather than show the procedural modeling with pseudocode or with a high level language such as C, the authors choose "Renderman", which is unfamiliar to many people and makes the included code useless to those uninitiated in that language. Plus, in many cases Renderman has functions that hide the details of particular algorithms. This is counterproductive, since the algorithms are supposed to be the point of this book in the first place, or at least I thought that they were.

My advice to people interested in this subject is to skip this book unless you can find it at a greatly reduced price and look online at Elias Hugo's webpages on procedural modeling. Mr. Hugo explains the authors' techniques much better than the authors themselves do.

I specifically targeted this book because of the disintegrate material effect but was unable to follow it cos of missing parts in the tutorials/scenes. upon trying to work it out my self , I still havent I will have to put this book in the toilet as emergency toilet paper. I was really dissappointed when I sent emails to coriolis to try and get the proper tut file scenes (2 years ago) and still havent recieved any feedback, this is so frustrating. I'll never buy another coriolis text again.

This book isn't much more than a picutre book, showing what 3D Studio MAX R3 is capable of. The tutorials are poorly put together, and some of them are missing steps which for some users might not be able to complete them. Not a book I recommend buying.

Wow, I don't know if they have awards for these kinds of books, but Jon Bell should be able to run away with this one.

He covers a lot of great stuff in this book including all the new things that R3 has. Including Flex, the new material options, plus it has some sweet models you can try. Like the SR-71 Blackbird, and an alien.

The CD that comes with is also the best to come around in a long time. It includes a bonus material library, hordes of free plugins including Greeble!, lots of free maps and chapter files. The Cd itself is worth the 40-50 bucks.

This one is worth the money!

If you want to get more out of 3D Studio MAX, then this book's for you. The chapters on advanced materials and lighting helped me create better-looking scenes immediately, and the special-effects stuff (including the great Greeble plugin) is well worth the price of the book. Highly recommended!

If there were ever 2 things I couldn't do well they were making good Materials and Organic Modelling...until I bought this book. Unlike other books that tell you how to recreate their effects, this book tells you what the steps presented do, allowing you to recreate and tweak them as you need. Excellent book!

I went to the McGraw Hill page set aside for the images in the book so that I could use them to work along with the book. This is always a very big factor in my decision to buy software oriented books. Most software books now have a companion site if a CD was not included. Literally, over 90% of the 20 software books I have bought in the past three months have a companion site online if they do not supply images and other goodies on a CD in the book itself. Being able to follow along with the same images is an invaluable learning tool. This book advertises the availability of images online on the cover and within. I'm afraid however, that the web links on the companion web page lead to nowhere and McGraw Hill's technical support person could not have cared less. He never got back to me as promised, the links are still broken and if I could I would return the book. The person I spoke to simply didn't care about my problem (apathetic beyond description)-it was quite evident in his tone of voice and in the ultimate not fixing of the problem. And yes, I spoke to the correct department. This is all Unfortunate, as this book has the potential to be a terrific workbook. Now it is nothing more than a run of the mill book and I don't like to buy from companies that do not stand behind their products and mislead their customers as to what their purchase includes. Shame on you Osborne/McGraw Hill. Hopefully, someone from this mega book supplier will see this review and fix the companion site. For now , I will not be buying any books from Osborne/McGraw Hill or any of its associated companies.

This is an extremely comprehensive guide that is packed full of clear illustrations. I consider the volume to be very readable and useful for a range of users, i.e., users new to CorelDraw or intermediate level and above. No wonder they call it the "Only Authorized Reference on CorelDraw 12"!

I selected this book after reading reviews on Amazon.com. I found the book an excellent supplement to the lynda.com training I purchased for the same program. It helped to fill in the gaps and expand upon the online training. I cannot compare it to the Coreldraw 12 unleashed cd since I have not viewed it, but I am pleased with my purchase. I enjoyed the book from start to end and that says a lot for a discriminating reader of technical publications. Because I use coreldraw 12 primarily to construct business cards, I do wish the book would have addressed color matching. However, there are other sources on this subject on the net. Enough said - great book!

If you're looking for a book to get you up and running with CorelDraw 12, this ain't it. This book uses the "Start with the File Menu..." paradigm. The first several chapters are taken up with mind numbingly endless descriptions of menus and tools and options, how to save files (duh) and discussions of features, the function of which the novice user has no clue. You don't actually get to draw anything until way into the second section of the book. (Note that I said Section, not Chapter). Even then, the explanations are so obtuse and convoluted that it is almost impossible for anyone without a vector based application background to figure out what's going on.
I suppose if one has experience with Corel or the Adobe products, this book makes sense and probably covers all the bells and whistles. But if you're a relatively computer literate person who just wants to learn how to use CorelDraw 12 from the ground up, get a different book.
DB

I use this book to supplement our graphic illustration course at a local college. It's amazingly precise for a third party manual and extremely thorough in covering every aspect of the program. We follow the tutorials to create our practical design projects.

One reviewer mentioned he had troubles with the companion Web site, but we've never had a problem downloading the files. We follow the Downloads link and locate the book from the alphabetized list. It's a couple of clicks at most.

I am not an artistically gifted person, so I was excited to see this book. I hoped, by the title, that there would be some good ideas for doing cool stuff with vector graphics in Illustrator and then optimizing them for the web with Photoshop, but I was sadly mistaken. The coolest elements of this book were the "60's Style" Conformed Text and the Text Following Path tidbits, but anyone with much experience in Illustrator probably already knows those things.

Do not get this book if you're looking for inspiration for web graphics.

As someone who's come to Photoshop and Illustrator from a tech background (I started out using them to design graphics for websites I was coding, and I'm now moving into using them purely for their own sake) I bought this expecting something high-brow and fairly abstract. Still, the reviews of past editions were good, so it must be worth a read...

However, on actually reading the book I was very pleasantly surprised to find...a recipe book. Lots of nice, step-by-step, two or three page descriptions of interesting graphical techniques you can apply, either to spruce up something you've already done, or as inspiration for something new altogether. Many of them are applicable to both Photoshop and Illustrator, and where appropriate instructions are given for both applications.

The techniques illustrated cover a wide range of subjects, from applying filters to photos to get a more painterly appearance to the creation of seamless textures, image compositing and the creation of semi-transparent object shadows in Illustrator. You'll almost certainly have seen some of them before (or arrived at your own ways to achieve similar effects) but there's enough in this book that you're sure to find something you'll want to add to your own list of techniques.

In a way this is "Photoshop 7 Down And Dirty Tricks" polite sister. The basic idea's the same (like I said, a recipe book) but the aim's slightly higher (i.e. improving your art, rather than impressing your boss). There's even some overlap in the techniques presented, although generally this book favours aesthetic results over flashy impact.

This book doesn't tell the reader where any of the controls, palettes, or windows are located or how to use them. Its title states "Professional Studio Techniques" and it means that. The book is written for PhotoShop v.5 and Illustrator v.8 and should easily provide inspiration beyond the current v.6 and v.10 of the two programs. Often the technical methods and processes discussed are relevant to achieving visual effects that express a particular mood appropriate for certain image types. Testing the methods in an experimental fashions to images of my own I have always achieve something of a satisfying innovative nature. In one sense the brevity of the authors explanations forces one to experiment and the nature of the illustrative art is meant to suggest creative possibilities. I came back to the book's web page in search of a newer edition I could purchase. Naught, so instead I wrote this review.

I'm not a professional graphic designer. But as a graphics enthusiast, and webmaster by profession, i take my occasional graphic design work quite seriously. As someone who is always searching for ways to use PhotoShop in better, more efficient ways, I found this book to be both helpful and inspiring.

Design Essentials is a very hands-on book, providing basic, short instructions, which familiarize the beginner and novice PhotoShop user with all the little tricks that transform an image from "nice" to "great", as well as providing the necessary explanations and "how-to" information on those tools beginners like myself still need to discover and maximize the full potential of.

Personally, i had a lot of fun both reading the book, and experimenting with its tutorials. I just wish I had a copy of Adobe Illustrator, since it seems like a wonderful tool.

It is an interesting book if you happen not to have the previous edition.
There are not too many new examples, these are added to most that appeared on 3rd edition. Sadly a compact narrow book format has replaced a more suited wide desktop size.
Techniques have not either got to far or up, is still somewhat basic and does not cover transparencies or other Illustrator 9/10 features.
A pity I went on holidays and could not return it on time. If you have have earlier book, look elsewhere.

The information was OK but not geared for beginners. What bothered me about this book was all the pictures of the little girls wearing makeup and jewelry. It isn't 'cute.' It just creeps me out.

I recently took a class to learn bead crochet, and this book was one recommended by the instructor. It has beautiful pictures, and does a good job of describing how to string based on graphs and charts, and a very enlightening discussion of the different types of stringing materials and their pros and cons. I had hoped for instructions on how to modify some of the patterns, but it doesn't have that. I'll have to work that on my own. I would not attempt to teach myself bead crochet from a book - you're just asking for trouble, but this is a great book once you have mastered the technique.

This book has an adequate technical description of the techniques and is helped if you also get the DVD book(?), Create with the Designers Beaded Crochet, of hers that contains some of the projects from this book where Ann Benson gives a good demo of the basics.
I guess some consider the projects tasteful but I think the majority of them are very old fashioned and I am a 66 year old grandmother! My main objection to this book are the photos of young girls dressed up with lots of makeup wearing these 'jewels'. This is where my review title comes in. These pictures are far too reminiscent of that poor child, JonBinet Ramsey, and therefore Kinda Creepy!

When I bought this book I thought I would be able to learn bead crochet from it without much difficulty. HA! The author uses bead slip-stitch and even though I had many years of crocheting experience........I just couldn't 'get-it'. Bead single crochet beginning with larger beads and thicker thread was a better technique for learning (for me anyway). Now that I learned (from another source)......I love this book and have used for several projects. It is a beautiful book, full of inspiration and I find it quite contemporary compared to vintage beaded ropes.

This book had lovely pictures of young girls wearing jewels but in my mind lacked the instruction/s I was looking for. When ordering a book to increase my bead crochet abilities that is exactly what I want - a how to book. This book did not fill that desire. This is not a book that I would necessarily keep in my library.

I read and fully enjoyed Dreamweaver MX HOT and got through it in 2 days flat not a problem. Got this as it is by the same author and the same cannot be said for this title. The examples are flawed in a good number of cases....procedures are missed out and many examples just don't work (try the masking a bitmap with text which they even supplied a full example for on the CD and following to the letter the text dissapears) I am a qualified lecturer in the implementation of software and this book has done nothing but frustrate me

I really loved this book because it was fun and interesting and it taught me exactly what I wanted to know. I thought the writing was clear and so were the examples. Do more!

in the H.O.T. tutorial style. I bought this book on the recommendation of Garo Green. He and Abigail authored Dreamweaver MX Hands-On-Training. They did a great job with the layout of the lessons as well as never assuming that you knew what they are talking about.

I find Fireworks MX Fundamentals lacking in the wording of the instructions as well as the lack of visual reference as you go through each numbered lesson. I have already put the book down out of frustration and currently looking around for another book on learning Fireworks MX. Maybe it is just me that I got spoiled by the format of H.O.T. books. I think Abagail should redo this book but through Lynda.com...I bet it would be 10x better. If you are self taught, this book might fall beneath your expectations.

This book was very informative and gave me a good foundation to build from. The book includes many exercises with the necessary files available on the CD that's included. A trial version of Fireworks MX is also included on the CD which would save download time if you didn't have a copy.

I feel the order of the chapters and information presented could have been better organized. There are a couple of spots where the author refers to topics as though you should be familiar with the subject that hadn't been discussed. However once she covered the topic later in the book I felt comfortable with the topic and tools.

This is a good book for the beginner.

The book takes a different approach to integrating graphics, animation, and the web. Easy to read literature with tons of
visual aids.

There's a fair amount of good content, with a couple of chapters on 3d by Glen Rhodes, who is a good author and inspiring scripter.

The authors in this book have provided an enormous amount of code to pick through and learn from. If that's your sort of thing this book is great!

Make no mistake the Authors do assume you have a handle on ActionScripting!

Really great detailed chapter on flash optimization!

Incredible book. The authors have brought the game classic game development environment on the flash platform.
Os probably the most complex book on flash games, but it' a must to have on your developer shelf!

Of course there's nothing new or amazing here as flash5 is "old" by this era's definition and this book was made in August 2001, but that doesn't mean having a book on this topic isn't useful in and of itself.

The problem with this type of book is that it skims the "core essentials" of gamemaking, and provides completed games for you to teach yourself... I could go to a dozen sites and teach myself games.

What I need is a book that holds your hand through building the essential widgets in game making. multiple hit tests, function completion, forking the same function with multiple instances, etc. Not something that says "see? here's a game that does all this stuff now look through it."

This book will only be frustrating to someone who loves the friends of ed series. . . but it acts as a great tool to sell the other books for sure, as I learned more about game making in Flash 5 Actionscript Studio & Flash 5 Dynamic Content studio than in this book.

Bottomline: this should have been entitled Flash Games Exhibition

I like this book alot. I have worked through a slew of books on
flash since Flash 4, and this one makes the most sense to me from the mechanics of game programming POV. Organized, and to the point. Don't make this the first book you read on Flash,
cause you will be in over your head. It focuses just on the advanced engineering of game relating to Flash.

This photographer has a GREAT EYE and see's things and men in an interesting way .. you'll enjoy it

By looking at the book cover, I thought that it would have lots of nude pictures, etc. And from the book title, I assumed this is a picture book about those models having fun after dark. But in reality, it is just a book of different male models in different poses. It only has a few nude pictures. Nothing too exciting, I think.

what a disappointment. mostly cliched and contrived images that lack emotional and visual impact. what should be provocative images come across as awkward and rehearsed. for the real thing, check out testino!

Supposedly the photographer shot these men after they had worked by day as models for fashion ads. They are thus apparently supposed to be being themselves, unposed, etc. If George Bernard Shaw were alive today and saw these boys, I'm not sure that he would say that it's a shame that youth is wasted on young people. With a couple of exceptions there's not a single photograph here that I would even think about purchasing and certainly not hanging on a wall. The lighting is garish, the composition is bad and many of the shots are out of focus. (Deliberately I hope.)

Brad Gooch gushes in his foreward. Yes, the photographs remind you of Larry Clark and Nan Goldin; but these two photographers did it much better and got there first. And how Gooch can call Lalli a "gay Helmut Newton" is beyond me. Paul Cadmus in his afterward makes a lot more sense when he says that these are boys he would not want to know, himself. I couldn't agree more.

To quote a line from Robert Browning, suddenly "I feel chilly and grown old" when I view these photographs.

"Fun ? Game: Male Models After Dark is a fascinating blend of the sexual and the silly, the enticing and the amusing: it's a collection of snaps taken by the uni-named fashion photog Lalli while casting for Calvin Klein; the bodies are mostly sheathed in slight briefs or lightly-draped shirts, and it's not a fount of full-frontal. But it is a colorful eyeful of good-looking goofs, a reminder that models have personalities. - review excerpt from RL at A Different Light Books

Game Design: The Art & Business of Creating Games is a wonderful text. I managed to read the entire book in only two days. Bob Bates manages to explain the hectic world of computer game design in a concise and friendly manner. Highly detailed yet written in lay man terms, Game Design offers just the right information to spark new ideas and more importantly, offer hope to aspiring new game designers. Even if you only wish to create games for yourself and your friends, Bob Bates tells you how you could possibly break into the business. He even offers helpful contacts in the form of websites for review. All in all, Game Design is a great book to begin research into this business field.

This book preaches about how to make a clone of an action game without really explaining the principles behind why a good game is good or the art of computer game design.

I found that it often contradicted Game Design Theory & Practice by Richard Rouse which is a much better book as it explains the principles of design with support from many experts rather than just saying that all games should be done a certain way.

Bates' book is quick and easy to read but not inspiring or thought provoking. Most of it was just common sense.

First of all, this book is nice to read to get a general picture of the process of making computer games. But, as others have already mentioned, it is very superficial and most of the content is just common sense. Not much here for anyone not completely new to the business.
But the biggest problem is that while Bob talks about game theory and business in a very shallow way (great for beginners), he support his theories with examples from big game companies (where nobody is a beginner anyway).

Ok, if you have ever designed a game for longer than 6 months, most of the book will be obvious. If you have NEVER done anything with games, the book will let you know of pitfalls to expect and things to do correctly. Overall though, it is STILL a great book for everybody to read. It's well-written, has lots of graphics, pics, and other user-friendly tidbits of knowledge. It does lean heavily on looking at design and management of a few key games and fails to mention ANYTHING about web-based games (i.e. games played strictly through a browser).
A good book nonetheless. Enjoy it and give it to your colleagues to read and learn :>!

Bob Bates has covered all the bases. The book illustrates many facets of the game design business... from descriptions of the different genres, to illustrations of what to do (and NOT do), to an explanation of what the various roles and responsibilities are of the people involved in game production. If you are at all interested in getting into the business of game development at any level, this book is a good read. It is light and understandable for people of all skills and disciplines. Well done, Bob.

We have a new blog setup for support on the book and to provide updated tips and tricks and extras when time permits.

[...]

We are grateful for all the positive feedback as well as the error catches, I have found our book in many studios over the last few years and it is always a nice surprise.

Stop by the blog and check out the new tips and or comment /email etc. as always we are happy to hear feedback or field questions on the book content.

Brad Clark

This is definitely not a book for beginners. My biggest issue with the book is that it gives you a bunch of step by step instructions without explaining why you're doing what you're doing. The books gives complex rigging examples without giving the main concepts behind them. The instructions are often times unclear and the pictures, which would probably explain things better than the text, are too small to be of any use. I guess since the title specifically says it's "advanced rigging" I shouldn't complain, but it seems like the only people who can follow this book are people who already know how to do this stuff.

I got this book specifically to assist in shoulder/arm rigging difficulties i've had with an animation that needed to be anatomically correct, and i wasn't disappointed. The book quickly asserts the scope of the problem, and makes it clear that a good solution requires a careful study of the model geometry, and supplies you with a realistic and powerful idea for a setup. It doesn't provide you with an ultimate solution, but rather suggests very helpfully approaches to specific problems, often supplying MEL scripts to assist, as well as downloadable example files demonstrating theory in practise.

The writing style is fluid and doesn't take you for a fool, and the included interviews with veteran TD's are all interesting. I wish there were more details on weighting and weighting practises aside from a suggestion to weight "backwards" (reducing weight from 1 instead of increasing from 0). In addition, the book attempts to include 3ds MAX in its teaching process, but largely fails, putting 90% emphasis on Maya (good for me!)

I'll recommend it to any novice/intermediate TD. I'd also recommend it to anyone wanting a better understanding of how a rig works, perhaps a modeller seeking to understand how to mend his geometry to best suit rigging.

I will second doodler's review; the content is in there somewhere, but the presentation is horrible. Pictures are unable to convey any information whatsoever do to their tiny size. Adding to the difficulty in following the instruction are the seemingly endless typos on node names, such as a dropped suffix or a dropped prefix. Whole steps seem to left out of other areas and the errata from the Course Tech website seems to contain only a fraction of the mistakes. This makes actually learning anything in a reasonable amount of time utterly impossible since you will spend most of your time trying to decipher what is a typo and what is not.

The main rigging tutorial in this book is very poorly written. What should be a great learning experience becomes a lesson in silly extra long naming pratices that will obscure all the intellegence of the actual rigging process.....the physical size of the book limits the pictures to a decorative effect. No real information is passed by the pictures and they are not included in any of the download data available. The main structure of his rig gets lost in a series of asides and remarks that make following the authors rigging tutorial into a joke. Bearly 3 steps can be included before a page change. This makes checking your work very hard and tedious. The real content just gets lost as every description includes a joint name that borders on 5 prefixes followed by 5 suffixs. By the time you select the right joint you have lost the process he is trying to teach you. So the first 170 odd pages are an exercise in translating his verbose descriptions into something logical. The content is there, it is just poorly presented.


Luckily, there is more then just the one author on this one!