Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone with Unity: Featuring modo and Blender pipelines [Paperback]

Wes McDermott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 2010

Revolutionize your iPhone and iPad game development with Unity iOS, a fully integrated professional application and powerful game engine, which is quickly becoming the best solution for creating visually stunning games for Apple's iDevices easier, and more fun for artists.  From concept to completion you'll learn to create and animate using modo and Blender as well as creating a full level utilizing the powerful toolset in Unity iOS as it specifically relates to iPhone and iPad game development.

Follow the creation of "Tater," a character from the author's personal game project "Dead Bang," as he's used to explain vital aspects of game development and content creation for the iOS platform. Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone focuses on the key principles of game design and development by covering in-depth, the iDevice hardware in conjunction with Unity iOS and how it relates to creating optimized game assets for the iDevices.

Featuring Luxology's artist-friendly modo, and Blender, the free open-source 3D app, along side Unity iOS, optimize your game assets for the latest iDevices including iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad and the iPod Touch. Learn to model characters and environment assets, texture, animate skinned characters and apply advanced lightmapping techniques using Beast in Unity iOS.

In a clear, motivating, and entertaining style, Wes McDermott offers captivating 3D imagery, real-world observation, and valuable tips and tricks all in one place - this book is an invaluable resource for any digital artist working to create games for the iPhone and iPad using Unity iOS. 

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Revolutionize your iPhone and iPad game development with Unity iOS, a fully integrated professional application and powerful game engine, which is quickly becoming the best solution for creating visually stunning games for Apple's iDevices easier, and more fun for artists.  From concept to completion you'll learn to create and animate using modo and Blender as well as creating a full level utilizing the powerful toolset in Unity iOS as it specifically relates to iPhone and iPad game development.

Follow the creation of "Tater," a character from the author's personal game project "Dead Bang," as he's used to explain vital aspects of game development and content creation for the iOS platform. Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone focuses on the key principles of game design and development by covering in-depth, the iDevice hardware in conjunction with Unity iOS and how it relates to creating optimized game assets for the iDevices.

Featuring Luxology's artist-friendly modo, and Blender, the free open-source 3D app, along side Unity iOS, optimize your game assets for the latest iDevices including iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad and the iPod Touch. Learn to model characters and environment assets, texture, animate skinned characters and apply advanced lightmapping techniques using Beast in Unity iOS.

In a clear, motivating, and entertaining style, Wes McDermott offers captivating 3D imagery, real-world observation, and valuable tips and tricks all in one place - this book is an invaluable resource for any digital artist working to create games for the iPhone and iPad using Unity iOS. 

About the Author

By Wes McDermott, Wes has been a professional 3D artist for 10 years, working in video production and print design. For the past six years, Wes has been the Multi-Media Developer for UPS Airlines at the Flight Training Center. He creates various 3D elements for video and interactive online training. Published in HDRI 3D magazine and a featured artist at Luxology.com, Wes has participated in beta tests for both Luxology and Autodesk, leading 3D software companies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Focal Press; 1 edition (October 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0240815637
• ISBN-13: 978-0240815633
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 0.6 x 9.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #635,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Wes has been a professional 3D artist for 10 years, working in video production and print design. For the past six years, Wes has been the Multi-Media Developer for UPS Airlines at the Flight Training Center. He creates various 3D elements for video and interactive online training. Published in HDRI 3D magazine and a featured artist at Luxology.com, Wes has participated in beta tests for both Luxology and Autodesk, leading 3D software companies. In addition to writing training books, Wes also runs the 3D Ninja blog producing video training for 3D Artist.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Information you won't find elsewhere May 22, 2011

By I. Tysoe VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

My husband has been working in the games industry for several years and recently started developing games for cell phones. Though he has a lot of experience with modern hardware he hadn't worked on mobile devices and we felt this would be a good book to get him up to speed.

The first thing that impressed him about this book was that it is printed in full color. Of course that was just a first impression. The second was that this is a quality product from a professional games artist who wants to teach you a lot of the core technical foundation knowledge that is so often overlooked in favor of the same old modeling and animation tutorials.

This book gives you a thorough grounding in the technical side of being a game artist. It covers a lot of hard earned knowledge that you probably will not find consolidated in one place. Even if all the character modeling and texturing tutorials were removed, this book would be a fantastic asset to anyone who wants to produce 3D game art. And while this book (as the name implies) concentrates on the iPhone, the lessons it teaches can be applied to other mediums. The author explains the relationships between the rendering hardware, CPU and GPU, how the computer renders what we see on the screen as well as the various obstacles involved in getting optimized assets into your game.

The book is about the iPhone but the same principles can be applied to any kind of realtime computer graphics whether its for a phone, computer or game console. The concepts that are covered in a concise and easy to understand way include: the relationships between vertices, triangles, surface normals and lighting. The book also explains the discrepancies between what you see and what the computer is actually drawing. It discusses subjects like pixel resolution and how this effects performance, vertex and face count, triangle strips and degenerate triangles, UV seams and lighting and how these all multiply in hardware rendering but are not apparent in your modeling tool. It talks about how to make the best of these principles and work towards budgeting your game assets so you can target specific hardware at the desired framerate.

It also covers the ins and outs of modeling and texturing with a wealth of insider information that is invaluable regardless which tools you use. The tutorials are extensive. They cover: character design and modeling, laying out levels and texturing with texture atlases, and various types of animation in Blender both character and canned animation which is later brought into Unity in the book use powerful free tools that are cross platform. The all-important techniques and information is not specific to the tools he uses and can easily be applied to expensive high-end applications such as 3DS Max and Maya.
In these tutorials he.

The later chapters focus on Unity 3.x and cover some of the new powerful features such as the recently integrated Beast Light mapping. Originally, my husband a bit skeptical that this book would be very useful since he had been creating game assets for over a decade. He was thus delighted to find so much good stuff that might otherwise take a long time to accumulate and a lot of trial and error to discover on his own. Some of this information can be found buried in various game development forums and tutorials online but very rarely as clearly and simply explained in a easy to follow manner.

To top it off, all the practical tutorials in the book have been reproduced in High Definition video to accompany the book, so you can log in and follow the book seeing first hand how these things are done. In the past books are usually accompanied by CD's containing sample scenes, but it's so much easier to follow if you can see a practical demonstration visually.

So he is quite pleased with the book and recommends it to anyone at any level. There's a lot of information crammed in here that you won't find in any one book elsewhere.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars If you are an artist working on iOS devices this is required reading October 22, 2010

By Gregory G. Pierce

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Let me first start off by saying that this author knows his stuff. As you read the book you learn that he has an intimate understanding of both Unity as well as the iOS platform.

If you're not a game developer - you will still get something from this as you will know what to look for from the art assets that you get in your workflow and you can then "gift" this for your artists so they create art assets that are more acceptable for Unity. However, much of what the author discusses is very art platform centric so if you are not artistic or speak that language you won't get much from this particular book as its not going to get into the basics of actual game development - this is a good thing!

The book also comes with access to some online materials that will follow the book and help you visualize what's going on, but if you're not a Blender or Modo person you may have some trouble as the book is clearly using these platforms as the workflow for development.

I would absolutely recommend this if you're an artist using Unity. I'd actually require that anyone working on my projects be aware of the concepts covered in this book and fortunately the author provides enough detail to not just be effective but to excel in this resoruce constrained environment with discussions about beast lightmapping, uv seams, vertex computation, minimizing ram use, etc. In all he covers the most crucial topics.

If you're an artist using Unity and you haven't read through this book - you're making a terrible terrible mistake.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book November 23, 2010

By Fourthings

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is an absolute must-have for any Unity Devs, I'm currently developing for Facebook and I'm not using Modo, but this book has been invaluable. It has helped us streamline the performance of our game and lead us onto new ideas and methods for doing so. It's fun to read, not overly complex, and extremely comprehensive on the subject.
The accompanying video tutorials are great too, great deal all-in-all.