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.
Showing newest posts with label game engine. Show older posts
Showing newest posts with label game engine. Show older posts
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Creating Game Art for 3D Engines
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.
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.
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