I Guess I'm No Dummy
I recently purchased the book, "3D Game Animation for Dummies." It was the first time I'd ever purchased a "For Dummies" book. It may be the last.

A more proper title for the book would have been, "Introduction To a Bunch of Widgets in Maya Personal Edition." It pays lip service to providing principles useful for other modeling packages, but half the book consists of step-by-step procedures on which buttons to push in Maya without ever explaining what is actually being done (or why). This makes it hard to extend this knowledge to other modeling packages.

Even worse, the book doesn't even go into animation until beyond the halfway point. There are about 377 numbered pages in the book, but only about 90 of them talk about, you know, ANIMATION. And about half of those are only talking about animation from inside Maya for things like cut scenes - nothing that would be applicable to real-time game animation. Stuff like using Maya's built-in physics systems to make balls bounce.

I guess I was seeking something more along the lines of, "Creating keyframes for realistic walking animation", or "how to rig up a face so for better facial animation." Though there is a chapter of eight pages on this latter topic, showing how to make a horrible-looking face smile. That's SOMETHING I guess. Though the information is less than I could glean from an average, free tutorial on the Internet, it at least brings some value to the book.

I guess the back of the book should have been a tip-off... if I'd seen it before buying it (I got it from Amazon). It brags, "Gain the skills that will get you into game design." So it's really catering to the same audience that Westwood College seeks with its "Be A Game Designer" television ads. ("I can't believe we got jobs doing this!")

The book spends 40 pages prior to the appendices (about as much pagecount as it spends covering real-time 3D game animation) talking about the Game Industry, and how to get a job in it. It insultingly (to me, at least) talks about the "creative jobs" in the industry, but mentions that there are jobs "on the other side of the aisle that includes game programmers." Yeah - those game programmers aren't creative at all. Nor do they create anything. Or something.

Anyway, I am a pretty awful n00b when it comes to modeling (FEAR my Flying Cows!) and even moreso with animation. But I guess I'm not a "dummy," so this book is pretty useless to me. I really can't recommend the book to anyone who has access to the far superior (and free) tutorials available on the Web.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:26 PM (Permalink)