Digital Beauties is a thick book. I mean big-old-wedge-of-paper type of thick book. It has a thick glossy cardboard cover (flexi cover I believe the official term is these days). The book has nearly 600 pages containing the work of around 100 digital artists. The content of these images is primarily studies of digitally created women. Although the book cover states that there are 2D and 3D CG characters I found that almost all images are 3D with a few 2D thrown in for good measure. Many of the artists in the book use 2D applications to do post-production (i.e.. After rendering in a 3D package) in applications like Photoshop.

I was pleased to see the diversity of applications used in this book covering a range software that can be found free on cover disks to some of the most expensive on the market.

I found examples of the following applications and plugins:

Pencil Sketches, inked then scanned.
Curios Labs Poser,
Corel Bryce,
Adobe Photoshop,
JASC Paintshop Pro,
Procreate Painter (Corel)
Robert McNeels Rhino 3D,
Newtek's Lightwave 3D,
Strata 3D,
Rhino 3D
Expression Tools SHADE R4,
3DStudio Max,
Mental Ray,
Combustion,
Inferno,
Henry,
Alias Wavefront Maya,
Right Hemisphere's DeepPaint 3D.

I found Digital Beauties a good example of the principal that all artists can become computer users but not all computer users can become artists.There are numerous examples of images created with Poser and Bryce that are simply stunning and also images that clearly have been edited out. Interesting there are Maya images that look badly textured, poorly modeled and, again, not fit to be in print. Of course there are also the ultra realistic Maya images that match Final Fantasy quality. In fact, a couple of the featured artists actually work on FF!.

One piece of software that may be fairly new to US and UK readers is ET SHADE (now in release 5). This 3D software had been around for over ten years in Japan thanks to 'Expression Tools'. A lot of the Japanese artist featured in the book use it as their primary application and this has lead to a great number of the images in the book being Manga style (Big eyes, child like bodies etc.).

I spotted this publication on the shelves of a book shop and the first thing I did was check the names of the artists that had contributed. Having read that Steven Stahlberg, Daryl Mandryk, Will Kramer and Rene Morel were all included I bought it without further a do.

If you aren't familiar with the work of these people take a look at the links provided and this will give you a good idea of the quality of digital imagery contained in this book.

However, as mentioned, there are over 100 artists in the book and each artist gets only a limited amount of space. One big disappointment is that some of the work chosen for the book doesn't come anywhere near that of the aforementioned artists. In fact, I would have to say that some of the work should never even have been considered for publication.