Digital Character Animation Book: 1 Book

This is a beautiful, full-color guide to creating 2-D and 3-D animated characters. Author George Maestri explains the aspects of creating animated figures, discussing anatomy, animated bodies, heads, and hands, poses and locomotion, anthropomorphic and facial animation, digital sets, and film-making. There are countless tips on animation, such as making a head turn and eyes blink, showing realistic laughter, speech, and body language, squashing and stretching characters, working out timing issues, and arranging characters onscreen as effectively as possible. Maestri doesn't emphasize any one software package or platform, though he does assume that you're doing mostly 3-D work. He writes for users of high-end packages such as 3-D Studio MAX and Soft Image, with their support for inverse kinematics and skeletal deformations, as well as for users of lower-end packages such as Strata and RayDream Studio. A hybrid CD-ROM includes models, textures, and animations for the book's projects. Beginners and expert animators can learn a great deal from this impressive book.Read More