Best Software Books

Digital Game-Based Learning

2008-02-10T06:48:00.001-08:00

This book is about software so I thought it qualified for my list. Besides that, it is an excellent, revealing read into the potential for game-based learning. Game-based learning has kind of a bad rap, even today, because those who do play games are more drawn towards pure entertainment, rather than "learning".

The truth is that the two can be woven together in fascinating ways. Mark's book on Digital Game-Based Learning was one of the first that adequately explored (the first, as far as I know) this subject.

If you are a game developer and interested in exploring the potential in this field, you will find a treasure trove of information in this book. Mark does his research well, and provides detailed footnotes for all of his research; also there are a wealth of quotes to stimulate your neurons. Here is one bit of research I made a mark next to, for example:

Current research in the areas of stress, anxiety, creativity, self-efficacy, and neuroscience shows that more play will improve our learning and performance.

That's a great way of looking at learning - combine it with play, because we like to play. The book is filled with insights into why we like to play, and what makes a game fun to play.

This book is a little over 400 pages long, and I just flipped through my copy - I have reminder marks in the margin next to probably 100 points I found interesting and wanted to be able to come back to later. I may add more excerpts from the book later - but read some of reviews of this book for yourself on amazon.

Photoshop 6 Artistry

2008-02-10T06:32:00.000-08:00

This book is a steal; yes, it's a little old (Photoshop 6) but it is packed with full color pages of screenshots and examples - nearly 500 pages in all. The quality of this paperback style book is excellent, and the paper is so thick because of this quality that the book is actually heavy.

I bought my copy almost five years ago when I needed to gear up for a Photoshop class I had to teach at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. A fellow teacher had a copy and I was amazed at the density of good examples and refences. I picked up a near-new copy off amazon at the time for about $2.50 - I just checked amazon and you can still buy this book used for a few dollars.

Don't let the fact that the book is about Photoshop 6 dissuade you from buying it. As with most major software, the Photoshop interface doesn't change much from release to release. I am running Photoshop CS at the moment and the tutorials and examples work just as well.

The Little Schemer

2008-02-10T06:18:00.000-08:00

Back in the days when I used to customize Autocad with AutoLisp, I bought several books on the LISP programming language. The best, most interesting, and most charming of all of these was called The Little Lisper. The book was simply a pleasure to read because of the wit and clean, clear writing of authors Daniel Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. I never forgot that book, which took me on a journey into recursion and even into dabbling with human-conversation simulation with lists.

When I went to add The Little Lisper to this page, I found that it is temporarily unavailable. As I continued investigating, I found a new effort by these two witty authors is now avaiable, called The Little Schemer has been published. Scheme is a dialect of LISP. LISP, for those who do not know it, is one of the foremost languages for artificial intelligence, because it is so good at list-processing.

I surveyed the reviews of this new book and the reviews looked similar to what these authors have received for The Little Lisper. One of the reviews said "Charming and Delightful but also Massively Mind-Stretching". Sounds like what I remember of The Little Lisper.

Visual Basic 6 from the Ground Up

2008-02-10T06:03:00.000-08:00

I had some a rather tough Visual Basic professor in 2001, and I went out and bought half a dozen books to help me get through the course. Visual Basic 5, From The Ground Up, by Gary Cornell, got me through more of the issues than any of the other books. It's the most worn, dirty, and used of my VB books because when I had a problem, I could usually find a decent example in this book that helped me with a solution.

One of the reviewers on Amazon mentions that there are way too many pages (my copy has over 700). But, when I am trying to solve a problem, and I finally find a reference that might be helpful, I am always quick to see how many pages they are going to give me on this suddenly precious subject. So, maybe as a quick reference, this book is overdone, but for me it was just right.

An Atlas of Anatomy for Artists

2008-02-10T05:47:00.000-08:00

Bones, muscle, tendons, veins, straight-on poses, action poses - you name it, this book has it. It is a classic, written in 1947 and revised since. I have one of the older copies. If you are an artist, or an aspiring artist, you need good references, and this book has them. Without good references, you are leaving too much to your imperfect visual memory - and unless you are a very rare individual, your work simply will not look right. That's because we can innately tell when something isn't right about things we have seen over and over (like the human body), though we may not know exactly what is missing.

All of the bones and muscles of the body are drawn from different views and named. Many of the sketch series in this book document the changes between young children, to adulthood, to old age. Not only do we have figures to study, but there are black and white photos of human specimens to study, posing straight-on and side-view - a range of sex and age. There are closeups of eyes and hands, two of the hardest bodyparts to draw.

The book closes with samples of drawings by masters such as Leonardo Da Vinci, and Michelangelo.

There may be better books on anatomy out there, as one Amazon reviewer claims, but if there is I haven't seen it. When in doubt, I will go with the time-tested classic every time.

Creating Game Art for 3D Engines

2008-02-10T02:29:00.000-08:00

The next book is my own. Creating Game Art for 3D Engines was written during the first half of 2007 and released late the same year. I had quit my job at the Art Institute to make a game with the Torque Game Engine. I spent a few months getting a handle on exactly how to create my characters and pickups in 3ds Max, and how to import them into the game engine so that they would "come to life". This process turned out to be more difficult than I had thought. To make the process more bearable, I started making notes of what was working and what wasn't.

I soon realized I could be like the others who posted at the forums and helped others with their problems using Torque, or I could rewrite my notes and create a book that would take the traveler from the sketch to the 3D game art, alive in the game engine. Unfortunately, it meant shelving my game for awhile.

In retrospect, it was worth it. In the past 20 years, I have written smaller software manuals for classes and never really had the time to cover a subject in depth. So it was a pleasure to use every teaching trick I knew of to make the process of creating the game art and getting it into the game as clear and simple as possible.

This book has an introduction to 3ds Max, and covers in full-color how to model, unwrap, texture, animate, export, and script game pickups and characters. The two characters covered are a humanoid-type and a robot (using different skinning methods). The book is 332 pages long, has 241 full-color figures, and comes with a book CD which has 90 minutes of video tutorials that go with the tutorials in the book.

There is an in-depth section on using helper bones with biped to minimize vertex collapse at the character joints; this is the only method I have found that works well. There are many things covered in this book that are completely non-intuitive, and if I had had this book when I first started my Torque game, I'd could easily have saved six weeks of full-time frustration.

There is much content in this book that would be useful to someone using 3ds Max to create characters or pickups for another engine, or someone who is developing game art for Torque using another modeling and animation package. This applies to the texturing as well - though I used Photoshop, the principles used in the book would apply to any paint package.

In any case, I should close this with just a quick word about why I chose this particular combination of software tools:

3ds Max was selected because I know it, I've loved it for many years, and it remains the leading modeling and animation development tool for the major game studios. You can find cheaper solutions, but you may struggle when it comes to interface, tutorials, exporting assets to a game engine, or sharing files with others.

Torque was selected because they offer the best bang for the buck in a game engine. If you look at games that have been created with Torque (see the game demos at www.garagegames.com), you will immediately recognize that Torque is a very powerful engine... particularly when you consider that the price is only $150. Finally, I was impressed by the forums at GarageGames.com. This engine boasts a healthy and knowledgable user community that help one-another and submit resources all can use. There is also a place on the Garagegames.com site for product documentation - this documentation is good, but it does not tell you everything you might need to know to make a game; that is why I wrote the book.

Photoshop was selected because it is the industry standard. I want to be able to send a native PSD file to others, I want them to be able to use mine (for example I have provided all the relevant PSD, Max, and Torque files on my book CD), and I want to know that the skills I spend so much time mastering will be relavent in the market.

I hope some of you check out the book and welcome your comments. If you want more detailed information on this book, please visit www.3dcognition.com, and click the book link.

Foundations of 3ds Max 6

2008-02-10T02:09:00.000-08:00

After Director's Third Dimension, the next best software book that leaps to mind is the Foundations of 3ds Max 6 by Aaron Ross. Like myself, Aaron Ross taught 3ds Max at an Art Institute - though we are at different Art Institues and have never met, I have been completely impressed by the clarity and teaching style in this book, and recommended it to my students every term.

If you are new to 3ds Max, this is the best, first, book to get. Do not let the fact that this book references 3ds Max 6 dissuade you from the purchase. The features that get added each release are generally for very advanced or specialized purposes. The ground-level of 3ds Max stays basically the same, release after release. A few hours a day with this book and you will have the basics down well inside of a month.

If you are already competent with Max, this is probably not the book for you; it does such a good job with the basics, there is really not much space left in the book for more advanced concepts or examples.

Aaron has chapters on how bitmaps work, the basics, the interface, using polygon meshes, shapes, splines, lathing, using modifiers, keygraming, using the Curve Editor, booleans, lofting, meshes, spline-cage modeling, creasting a faucet, creating a simple car, modeling a spaceship, working with materials, cameras, lights, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, character animation, and special effects. He hits all the basics so you will have a clue what is going on in the complex world of 3ds Max.

One project he walks the reader through involves modeling a Low Polygon Toy Car sets up the project extremely well, explains new tools and techniques for each new feature on the car, and by the end it is amazing how well he managed to sneak in so many valuable concepts into a simple modeling project.

I can well imagine how this book happened; teaching the first few terms of 3ds Max is very demanding for an instructor, and you have limited time to get some pretty complex information into the heads of between 20 and 25 students at a time. Aaron, like myself, was simply forced by the demands of the job to streamline his verbage and examples until they were as perfect as possible.

Aaron knows how to explain clearly and how to keep it simple. After wrestling with teaching themselves (very time consuming and almost impossible), or with poorly written manuals (unfortunately very common), many students have been blessed by this excellent introduction to 3ds Max.

Director's Third Dimension

2008-02-10T01:44:00.000-08:00

This is an excellent book - in fact I cannot think of a book I have been more impressed by offhand; therefor it goes first on the list. It helped me understand how to create a 3d game using Macromedia Director (now in the hands of Adobe - please give this cool package lots of loving attention, Adobe).

Paul Catanese writes clearly and concisely, and breaks his book up into sections on (my words following) 3d Castmembers, Creating Models from Scratch With Lingo (the script programming language built-in to Director), Transformations, Lighting, Cameras, Hierarchies, Importing Objects from Modeling Software, Creating Graphs and Charts in 3d, Texturing, Using a Mouse on 3d Objects, Surfaces, Special Effects like Particles and Animated Textures, 3d Interface Design, 3d Collision Detection.

Paul's examples are short and sweet. You can use them to get your sea-legs, until you are able to modify them and eventually write your own.

While I am now more focused on the Torque Game Engine (Director simply cannot compete with the superior immersive qualities of Torque, or the in-general much more powerful game-making features and scripting possibilities), Director is still a very useful tool for interface design and game development, particularly over the web (via Shockwave). If Adobe gives this amazing, real-time 3D development tool half a chance, it will help to change the Internet as we know it. Unfortunately for now, Director has not seen any notable 3d feature additions or improvements for nearly five years.

If you aren't familiar with what Director can do, you can see some of my learning games at www.3dcognition.com, or go to the biggest shockwave site I know of, www.shockwave.com.

Director's Third Dimension gave me a handle on Director and Lingo more than any other language or class, and the CD that comes with the book is invaluable. Hats off to Paul Catanese for one of the absolutely best software how-to manuals of all time.

Introduction to Best Software Books

2008-02-10T01:34:00.000-08:00

This blog is about the best software books out there for learning various applications, and peripheral books that can help in the design or development process. Who has not purchased a book that claimed to be able to teach a software program in 30 days, only to find weeks later that the contents of the book did not live up to the marketing?

Buying a good book can be such a huge time-saver, that I thought I'd share my favorite book picks, and hopefully some of you will chime in with yours. I will only recommend books that I personally own and have read, and have found at least decent. I will try to give you the benefit of my experience with these books before you spend your hard-earned dollars, and precious time, purchasing them and reading them.

In return I ask that you feel free to agree or disagree, or add your own recommendations.