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Blue Sky: The Art of Computer Animation
The Academy Award-winning animation studio, responsible for the computer-generated effects in such movies as Alien Resurrection and Joe's Apartment, presents a frame-by-frame tour through the 3-D animation process, providing a behind-the-scenes look at their first full-length film, Ice Age, featuring the voices of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, and Denis Leary.
86 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 17, 2016
This book was a bit of fun which turned in to a lot more.
I have always had a love of animation and yes I do have a copy of the Ice Age films. So when I spotted this book (along side the Sirens & Fantasia 2000 books) I knew I had to have it.
The book really is part history, part guide to how Blue Sky - the animation studio behind such films as the Ice Age series create these amazing films.
As you can imagine there is only so much information they can present in 86 pages but the book is lavishly illustrated and is quite informative although as you can image it is now dated. Now saying that you cannot really hold that against the book since like all things computer related the speed at which they evolve at means that any book published on the subject is almost instantly dated.
So what can I say about the book and the people at Sky Blue - well apart from their incredible talent which i an really jealous of - that anything is possible if you persevere at it and have a great story to tell. Which to me means sit back and let them get on with and just enjoy their creations for what they are.
I have always had a love of animation and yes I do have a copy of the Ice Age films. So when I spotted this book (along side the Sirens & Fantasia 2000 books) I knew I had to have it.
The book really is part history, part guide to how Blue Sky - the animation studio behind such films as the Ice Age series create these amazing films.
As you can imagine there is only so much information they can present in 86 pages but the book is lavishly illustrated and is quite informative although as you can image it is now dated. Now saying that you cannot really hold that against the book since like all things computer related the speed at which they evolve at means that any book published on the subject is almost instantly dated.
So what can I say about the book and the people at Sky Blue - well apart from their incredible talent which i an really jealous of - that anything is possible if you persevere at it and have a great story to tell. Which to me means sit back and let them get on with and just enjoy their creations for what they are.
March 2, 2015
Blue Sky: The Art of Computer Animation is well researched, well written, decently organized, and contains some interesting imagery, but there's no reason anyone besides Blue Sky historians should pick this book up. It's a good read if you want to know about Blue Sky's production pipeline as it existed in 2002. Just curious about animation pipelines in general? Do a Google search. Want to know about the current state of Blue Sky? Skip this book because it's hilariously out of date.
Here's a quote from the book that aptly illustrates how far things have progressed since 2002: "Each Compaq in the render farm has 1 gigabyte of RAM, more than ten times the amount of RAM in the average desktop computer." For comparison, the laptop I'm typing this review on has 8 gigabytes of RAM, and 8 gigabytes isn't even considered a lot by many.
A book being outdated doesn't mean it's flawed. Rather, it means time has passed. Becoming outdated is an inevitability when profiling any non-defunct company.
Besides being outdated though, I do have one concrete criticism I'd like to share. The animated filmmaking process is complex and technical, so any discussion of the steps involved will understandably include a lot of detail, but I don't think Weishar goes far enough with some of his descriptions. He frequently introduces complex concepts, such as radiosity and volumetric rendering, and then devotes only a handful of paragraphs to each. If you're new to these concepts, then you're left confused. If you're already familiar with these concepts, then you're left without any new information to take with you.
Overall, I liked it, but I can't recommend that anyone else read it.
Here's a quote from the book that aptly illustrates how far things have progressed since 2002: "Each Compaq in the render farm has 1 gigabyte of RAM, more than ten times the amount of RAM in the average desktop computer." For comparison, the laptop I'm typing this review on has 8 gigabytes of RAM, and 8 gigabytes isn't even considered a lot by many.
A book being outdated doesn't mean it's flawed. Rather, it means time has passed. Becoming outdated is an inevitability when profiling any non-defunct company.
Besides being outdated though, I do have one concrete criticism I'd like to share. The animated filmmaking process is complex and technical, so any discussion of the steps involved will understandably include a lot of detail, but I don't think Weishar goes far enough with some of his descriptions. He frequently introduces complex concepts, such as radiosity and volumetric rendering, and then devotes only a handful of paragraphs to each. If you're new to these concepts, then you're left confused. If you're already familiar with these concepts, then you're left without any new information to take with you.
Overall, I liked it, but I can't recommend that anyone else read it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews