Professional 3D With ElectricImage Universe: Amazon.ca: Lance Evans: Books

Book Description

Professional 3D with Electric Image Universe covers the latest release of Electric Image Universe 4.0 (formerly known as ElectricImage). This new version consists of major refinements and workflow adjustments, a lower price, and new cross-platform support (Windows, Solaris, and Mac OS). Written for users of Electric Image products, including EIU, EIAS (EI Animation System), and the 3D Toolkit, the book clearly explains the different programs that make up the Universe suite of tools: Modeler, Animator, Camera, and Renderama. After thoroughly covering these tools and their new features, the book provides practical ideas and techniques for using them effectively. All of the major 3D areas are covered in detail, including rendering, character animation, special effects, and post production. Each area includes hands-on tutorials from EIU pros that teach users how to maximize the power and functionality of EIU. There is also a final project that looks at production as! a whole to provide users with a start-to-finish production for analysis. FEATURES:

* Helps new and experienced users get up to speed with EIU’s new tools

* Teaches how to accomplish high end visual effects, including water, explosions, and hard and soft body deformation techniques

* Explains character animation tools and explores walking, facial animation, and lip-synching

* Covers a variety of new third Party tools, such as Expressions scripting plug-in, and HeadGames for auto lipsynching, etc.

* Provides expert advice and guidance for mastering the powerful functionality of EIU

* Includes a companion CD-ROM with a wide variety of support files and tutorials, sample applications, movie files, a demo of EIU, and a Fact Model Disk Sampler of 50 FACT format models.

* Includes an appendix with an overview of EIU on OSX, Windows, and Solaris operating systems

About the Author

Lance Evans (New York, NY) is the founder of 3DNY.org, and is the creative director of Graphlink Studios in NYC. Commercially he has produced 3D projects for many of the major advertising agencies and post houses in NY, has taught 3D and other graphics related subjects for years, and is a developer of 3D related utilities. He has been a member of Beta test teams for Electric Image, Lifeforms, Mac Maya and many other 3D graphics software companies, and writes for 3dNY.org in articles ranging from opinions and reviews to software manuals and How-To’s.

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Insightful book with excellent examples! Feb 10 2003

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Lance Evans writes this book as if he were speaking directly to you. With wit, he covers topics thoroughly and in a manner easy to understand. I already had some EIU working knowledge, but no where enough to even create some of his examples. Through this book, Lance Evans has answered so many questions and provided excellent insight into so many issues not resolved by reading the manuals. Actually, it would have been great if he had been the EIU manuals writer. Furthermore, the care to detail is just simply superb! Thanks!!!

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Graduate Class in 3d Jan 24 2003

By Brian Walchiack

I am one of the minority of people in the industry that actually went to school for animation. Mr. Evans book gives us an understanding of how things work better than any professor I ever had in school. I am amazed at how he has taken subjects that ramble on for 50 pages in other books, and made them crystal clear in 10 pages. And even given more information!

This book treats the reader as an intelligent and capable person. It does not try to teach you basic things like how to use a Bezier pen the way some other material we purchased has done. There is so much in this book that as diligent as we have been by working on it every day, there is still so much we have not done yet. I think this book will take us 6 months to carefully make our way through. Mr. Evans has included literally hundreds of tutorial projects on the disk, I have never seen a book like this before. This is why I say it is like a graduate class in animation.

The other two things that I feel should be mentioned is the sheer number of topics that were covered in this tome, and how many of them are techniques I have never seen anywhere else. And I have a at least 40 other 3d books on my shelf. He tells you how to set up your render farm computers with extra TCP/IP addresses, how to manually add extra tessellation to ACIS models (I asked the developer this question and they told me it could not be done!), explains all the mouth positions for lip sync animation, teaches how to create UV data on models that don't have any, and even how to feather deformations. I could go on and on. The book even has a trailer online...I can't recommend this book enough. My company bought a book for our 3d graphics department, but each of the 5 people in it has since gone out and bought their own copy. Even though 2 of the people use other programs.

Lives up to its name Jan 4 2003

By Mae

The chapters build upon each other to create a comprehensive reference. I was impressed with the advanced subjects, especially those in the deformation and morphing chapters. There are more tutorials than any other 3d book I have read, and the multi-pass tutorial was especially thorough.

The section on the modeler application had tons of tips and works the reader through many different types of projects.