two thumbs up!
When I decided to do a review of iClone Beginner’s Guide I realized I have to look at it from a different perspective. I say that because I have been an iClone user since day 1 and in that context, am very familiar with iClone and its inner workings. However because I am a long time user, I know there are many tips, techniques, work arounds that exists that may be new to me. So I approached M. D. McCallum’s book from an experience user’s perspective as well as a newbie, trying to make his/her first movie. So in conjunction with this review, I decided to make a movie and put myself in the shoes of a newbie making his first movie
Starting off with the table of contents, one quickly realizes how thorough and comprehensive this book is – it has, since purchasing it, become my reference manual. Anytime I get stuck, the anwer is only a simple search of the table of contents. This makes it especially easy for an experienced user to go right to the section needed. For example, I needed a desert scene with dust blowing all over the place. A quick look at the table of contents and I found Chapter 2, ‘Creating your First Scene’, and followed the tutorial to create my first landscape. Jumping back to the table of contents I discovered texturing and how to use texturing, allowing me to change my landscape into a desert scene. So an experience user, knowing what he wants to do, can easily find the section to address his need.
Of course if I was a new user, I wouldn’t necessarily know that i can change the texture, but if I follow the sequence of chapters laid out before me, I can methodically build on what I learned – first the scene, then the props to decorate the scene, then the lighting…you get the picture (no pun intended). The book is structured in such a way that learning one thing opens the door to the next thing.
What I especially like is each section concludes with “What just happened?” - if you look at many how-to books, one quickly realize that often times you end up following a process, yes you get to the end result but likely without necessarily understanding what you just did. To me this is the equivalent of rote memorization, you know you have to do step A but you don’t know why so you might not be able to put 2 and 2 together quite as easy. So back to the “What Just Happened?” section – this section provides an explanation of what you just did and why you did it – this made the learning much more effective and it drives in the point and also allowed me to easily combine a couple of concepts together.
The book covers a lot of movie making technquies and one I especially like is the use of cameras – iClone has a robust set of cameras and as a long time user, I basically use my eyeball to determine how to set it up and where to set the cameras up. The books provides the much needed primer on understanding the camera lens and how they can be used. For my movie, I needed a camera to zoom out from a rider on a hill, down to the valley to another character but my scene had certain error that I can take some time to fix or use the tricks described in the book to mask it – I opted for the masking. There are many more little gems in this book that as an experienced user, I find very enlightening often hit me the eureka moment of ‘why didn’t I think of that?’
In conclusion I highly recommend the book. While the title says iClone ver 4.1 many if not all of the techniques are applicable to iClone 5. There is plenty of meat for the
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