Digital Character Animation: With CDROM Paperback – January, 1996

Description

.com Review 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 From the Publisher Bringing life to computer generated objects is an art form that many of today's computer artists have not been effectively trained in. This book provides the essential information grounded in the basics of traditional cell-animation that computer animators need to generate believable characters in 2-D and 3-D computer graphics. - Provides in-depth information on character animation techniques - Shows readers how to produce the professional quality 2-D and 3-D computer generated characters for their products - CD-ROM includes QuickTime and AVI examples of Multiple Walk Cycles, Lip Synch examples, 3D models, texture maps, and software demos Read more