Essential Lightwave: The Fastest and Easiest Way to Master Lightwave 3D Paperback – June 29, 2007

If you are new to Lightwave and looking for a jump start, there is no better way than this book. The book is split up into different chapters based on the difficulty of the exercise. So if you are like me and have used Lightwave for many years, there is still something here for you. But if you are brand new, even to 3D in general, you will be ok.The modeling exercises alone are worth the cost of the book. Concepts are discussed, then explained. Then you have an exercise where you get to use those concepts. The tools get a thorough workout and you really come away with an understanding of not just how the tool works, but also why you are using that tool to begin with.As mentioned by someone else, the UV editor is covered extremely well. Third party plugins are also covered. The intermediate modeling exercise of modeling a house uses the Pictrix plugins throughout. Those plugins rock BTW!!Saslite is covered very well also. There are also very good sections on hypervoxels and particles. I will admit that some areas of the book just scratch the surface, but as deep as Lightwave is, that is understandable. Make no mistake though, there is enough information in every section to get you started and serve as jumping off points.There are also a ton of video tutorials included on the DVD that accompanies the book.The last thing I want to mention is the writing style of the authors. Imagine a friend helping you to learn something. Imagine that they are very patient and have a sense of humor. But at the same time the friend is also very knowledeable. That is what you get here. By the time you read through 3 or 4 chapters, you feel like you have known the authors for years.That is the mark of good writing, especially when it comes to instructional books. The authors are very knowledgeable and often challenge you to think about things in a way you might not be used to doing.I have been using Lightwave for nearly 10 years, going back to 5.6. This is the best general purpose Lightwave book I have read in that time. Sure, I have other books that are more detailed in certains areas, but that is all they cover. This book covers a little bit of everything and deserves to be on the desk of every Lightwave user out there.

Plain and simply, this book will tell you all you need to know about the basic ideas behind creating and manipulating 3D graphics. I picked it up with a prior basic understanding of Blender 3D, but I'd say it's completely accessible even to those with no experience. Clearly written with a familiar, friendly tone, this is quite literally one of the most coherent instructional documents I've ever read.In order to get the most out of this masterpiece, be sure to do EVERYTHING the book says, in the order that it tells you to do it. This is basically a complete academic semester crammed into 1000 pages, so treat it as such and you will be bountifully rewarded. Take notes, practice on your own when it tells you to practice on your own, and always spend time tinkering around after you've completed a tutorial.The authors are also incredibly decent human beings. Case in point: I ran into a technical wall one week where something I was trying to do wasn't working, so, noticing that Steve Warner and Kevin Phillips had included their contact information on the front page, I shot them both a desperate email on the off chance that one of them might take pity on me and help me with my problem.Within six hours, BOTH of them responded. And it wasn't just a quick one sentence response, either. They wrote me a full five paragraph summary that not only included the solution to my problem, but also the origins of how the problem came into existence and measures that should be taken in order to ensure that the problem didn't happen again.This mammoth book also includes hours and hours of video tutorials, sample content relating to each chapter, ENLARGED CHAPTER SCREENSHOTS (this blew my mind), and dozens of vital plug-ins that allow you do most menial Lightwave tasks in half the time it would usually require with out of the box tools.A must have! If you've been fiddling and self-teaching yourself for a while but nothing seems to really click together, read this book! It will make everything click!

This book has helped my Lightwave skills tremendously. I would give it 5 stars except for the DVD wasn't checked before shipping and contains a few corrupted files (new files can be downloaded from website) and I don't like all the poor illustrations. I know it lowers the cost of the book to do the illustrations in black/white but I would be willing to pay more for colored illustrations. Even though the DVD contains the digital illustrations it's a pain to boot up the PC whenever I want to see them. That being said this is the best book to learn Lightwave because it contains beginner, intermediate and advanced topics.