I teach a college class in LightWave, and after skimming LightWave 3D 8 Revealed, immediately ordered it for the course. True, there are no in-depth tutorials or color pictures, but I've found that beginning students need more basic exercises. You can't build elaborate models if you can't even select points, and you can't animate if you don't know how to insert keyframes. Just as one has to practice finger excercises on the piano before playing Mozart, one has to learn polygons and layers before creating masterpieces.
LightWave Revealed is crammed with simple excercises demostrating virtually every feature in LightWave, both Modeler and Layout. Accompaning each excercise is a concise explanation of what the tool does. Yet the book is only slightly over 400 pages. How can one cover all the multitude of tools in so little space? The answer is that this book is all meat. There's no pointless fluff. It packs lots of information in the pages, yet there's no sense of cramming. The pacing is easy.
Also, the pictures are some of the best I've ever seen in any graphics manual. Where some books print images that seem blotched, these are crisp and clear. They're actually slightly clearer than the images in the reference manual.
The book is divided into 13 chapters, which breaks down very neatly for a one semester course. There's no CD with sample files - you have to download those from a web site. Still, that keeps the book's price to a very reasonable level.
For some reason, though, books on 3D animation always tend to leave out something. In this case, Inverse Kinematics gets shut out. Still, the book covers so many topics that I even learned something about tools which I rarely use.
If you want descriptions of complete projects in LightWave, you'll have to look elsewhere. But for the beginning student, I haven't found a better introduction.
