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Real-time 3D Character Animation with Visual C++ [Paperback]

Nik Lever
2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
Price: £49.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Book Description

17 Dec 2001
Do you have some experience and a reasonable knowledge of C++ and want to write your own computer games? Have you ever looked at a PC or Playstation (R) game with characters running and leaping through an exciting landscape and wondered how it was done? If so then this book will give you all the information you need to achieve this goal, whether you are a hobby programmer, student or even a professional wanting to add that third dimension to your website.

Nik Lever takes you through the journey from the basics of 3D manipulation all the way to morph objects and sub-division surfaces. On the way you get Visual C++ project files to study and software that runs on the Windows desktop. The free CD-ROM gives you a full-featured development environment for 3D character animation, so even if you find some of the maths and the code hard to follow straight away you can still create your own games. The game engine (Toon3DCreator) provided free and fully functional on the CD-ROM, even has an ActiveX control that allows you to distribute your work on the Internet. All source code for Toon3D is included on the CD. You will also get an insight into the artist's problems; learn how to keep the characters interesting while not exhausting the game engine.

Understand the complete picture and make the most of your skills to help you succeed in, or break into the computer gaming industry with this comprehensive guide to programming for real-time 3D character animation.


Product details

  • Paperback: 496 pages
  • Publisher: Focal Press; Pap/Cdr edition (17 Dec 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0240516648
  • ISBN-13: 978-0240516646
  • Product Dimensions: 18.9 x 2.5 x 24.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,395,772 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • See Complete Table of Contents

Product Description

Review

"By covering character animation in depth, Nik Lever's book digs right in to one of the most interesting and challenging areas in computer graphics and interactive entertainment. The book provides algorithms and source code for many advanced topics that are at the leading edge of real-time 3D technology. Programmers interested in bringing life to their interactive characters should definitely have this book."

Jeff Lander
Darwin 3D and Game Developer Magazine

"Packed with features, 'Real-time 3D Character' promises to help program-savvy designers hone their techniques still further."
Edge Magazine

From the Publisher

Nik Lever takes you through the journey from the basics of 3D manipulation all the way to morph objects and sub-division surfaces. On the way you get Visual C++ project files to study and software that runs on the Windows desktop. The free CD-ROM gives you a full-featured development environment for 3D character animation, so even if you find some of the maths and the code hard to follow straight away you can still create your own games. The game engine (Toon3DCreator) provided free and fully functional on the CD-ROM, even has an ActiveX control that allows you to distribute your work on the Internet. All source code for Toon3D is included on the CD. You will also get an insight into the artist's problems; learn how to keep the characters interesting while not exhausting the game engine. Understand the complete picture and make the most of your skills to help you succeed in, or break into the computer gaming industry with this comprehensive guide to programming for real-time 3D character animation.

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Customer Reviews

2.7 out of 5 stars
2.7 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Good for understanding the basics 4 Dec 2005
Format:Paperback
This book gets a lot of bad critisism, but you should look at this book another way.
If you don't know anything about animating characters in 3D, this book will help you get started.
It will NOT help you build a fantastic 3D animation game, but it will help you understanding how the basics work and where you should get started.
From there, you're on your own, and you will see that a lot of basics explained in the book are no longer really useful, but these basics are still needed for you to get started or you will end up nowhere.

The 3DS MAX importer (uses the .ASE format, not the .3DS format) is explained well, but here also, you are on your own on some point. This book helps you get started. I assume this is the same with the Lightwave importer.

And then there's the Toon3D application included. For me it was not at all any useful, so don't expect to get reusable or even understandable c++ code. Here again, you're on your own after you understand the basics.

There's a lot of fun to read information in the book, but that doesn't help you very much.

Conclusion: use this book to get started but don't think you will have it all with this book.

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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Good book for character animation in OpenGL 5 Feb 2002
Format:Paperback
This book covers board areas of character animation in c++ with OpenGL and touch some advanced topics such as motion capture, subdivision surface (touch, not really in depth or details). The most interesting part of this book, to my opinion, would be the part which teach you on how to import character data from the popular modelling packge like 3D studio Max into the rendering engine. The deficiency of this book would be a fact that it doesn't cover the advanced or state of the art character animation topics such as skinning especially using the hardware acceleration features of the modern graphics card.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Not good at all 6 Feb 2003
Format:Paperback
I bought this book for one reason only and that was the fact that i wanted to parse, render and animate 3ds files (the fact that the book covers lightwave files was a bonus)

After looking through many tutorials on the net i had found a few 3ds loading tutorials but I wanted a 'proffesional' level paper copy which describes the format and how to manipulate it. In the synopsis the book claims to offer this.

Ok i'll cut to the chase :

The writing style is god awful

The book uses MFC examples which are not good for learning people with.

The author is pushing his 'Toon3D' App / Engine which isn't very good and the fact that he has coded many functions into this allows him to slyly gloss over topics with the phrase "The Toon3D engine allows you to do this."

There are only 7 code examples on the CD and even those are awful and contain very few comments explaining whats going on (all use MFC). 90% of the examples are just rubbish 3D model files in his Toon3D format (No Code At All).

There is no discussion of the 3ds format only the ase format which Max allows you to export. Furthermore there is no code examples for this chapter, instead you have to attempt to lift the code from his Toon3D source.

In conclusion i found this book to be big on promises and small on factual content ...

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