Inspired 3D Lighting & Compositing

Rating:
Summary: generalist book
Review: I dont know, it had a lot of inserts by 'industry pros', but it is more of the same info everyone else writes. Good for the Mom or Dad of someone entering the field, but not much help to an actual artist. The book avoids actual tutorials and rewrites the basics from the software manual. However, it does put information into a smaller condense nugget than the software manual . . . but manuals are free with the software.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book for us newbies.
Review: I've now read through a small pile of CG books and I found that my self-studies would not have been complete without Parrish's excellent book. I wish I discovered it earlier when I first started struggling with 3D modeling and rendering software. I would recommend this as the first book a beginner in computer graphics should read; but also worth reading if you are a bit farther down the road.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book for us newbies.
Review: I've now read through a small pile of CG books and I found that my self-studies would not have been complete without Parrish's excellent book. I wish I discovered it earlier when I first started struggling with 3D modeling and rendering software. I would recommend this as the first book a beginner in computer graphics should read; but also worth reading if you are a bit farther down the road.

Rating:
Summary: Simply the Best Book to date on Lighting
Review: Not only is this the best text on lighting and comp I've ever read, it's the ONLY one that comes from an industry professional who's body of work speaks for itself. It's about time a comprehensive approach surfaced on this subject which a lot of times can make or break your project. The interviews with Dennis Muren and Pixar's Lighting Supervisor are alone worth the price of this book. Anyone serious about lighting should have this resource on their shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Great for every CG artist
Review: This book is not tutorial based, and although many may say that it goes over the basics, its actually more of a personal enrichment process. Don't buy this book if you're a newbie and are just looking for tutorials to carry out. This book serves to make you wiser in the CG career and understand how things work, great reading material.
My only crit is that I don't like the horizontal style of the book, when you're sitting down to read it, its a pain because its so wide! I would have very much preffered a vertical book as this one being horizontal makes it easy for the covers to bend permanently, which is not pretty if you like to take good care of your books like I do.

Rating:
Summary: Pictures not very connected to text
Review: When I first got this book, I looked through all the pages, and there was a colour picture at least once every few pages - and many came from famous ILM films such as Jurrasic Park. I looked forward to reading about how these images were lit or rendered or composited -- but (sadly) the text had very little if anything to say about the specific shots, the images often were a tangent to the main topic of the text, where it seemed as if it were a stretch to work in a mention of the image. I don't blaim the companies for wanting to keep everything about their work a secret, but without any specifics the general discussions in this book were essentially unillustrated and not very useful. I wish they would publish a more technical and specific book about lighting and rendering and compositing for visual-effects film-making!