Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone working Unity iOS - especially if you're starting out, or fairly inexperienced (relatively speaking of course - the book isn't really for complete beginners).

The book is very nicely put together, with some great insights into the iOS platform, and into game development in general that have got me thinking about things I'd not considered previously. That alone has already been worth the asking price for me.

Given the lack of Unity resources out there, I've been buying up anything that looks even half-decent, and to be honest this book started out as just an impulse buy. I've been pleasantly surprised though by how absorbing the material is - I've even gone back to reread sections; something I hardly ever do with most of the books on my pile.

Wes McDermott has done a great job of bringing tech and art together in this book based on the Unity platform. Unity is a specific game development platform that has a free base engine, but requires a pretty hefty investment to get to all the features discussed in this book. If you don't own Unity, this book will give you a very good idea about the capabilities of the platform. Other books I have reviewed on this subject have been long and droning, with little depth. This book breaks concepts into clear, concise bite-size pieces that are insightful and easy to understand. Every concept and instruction point goes beyond just explaining what to do; the author also gives helpful background and depth.

I dabble with many programs, and Unity was new to me, so I thought I'd get this book to learn about it.

Mistake. Visit the Unity3D site, first. Unity is a free download. Unity Pro is $1500, and the pro versions for iOS and Android are another $1500 each. But the free version can give you a great taste for it, with great video tutorials and a fairly good online manual. After reading the manual, I was more ready for this book.

"Tater is a reluctant hero from a personal game project I've been working on called Dead Bang." Expect to see a lot of Tater in this book, with a belly bulging out from a no. 77 jersey. The whole book is devoted to getting Tater working.

Then, it's right into frame rate budgets, render budgets, vertex budgets. I'm not at that level of game programming yet -- this is a book for professionals.

The first pipeline covered in chapters 2-4 is for modo ($995 from luxology). Chapters 5-7 cover animation in Blender (free).

I didn't get to the stage of trying modo. Still, recommended if you're a professional that's read the Unity manual.

This book provided a great tutorial to get me started in the iphone app world. I am a person that like to learn by example and this book did just that. I was not able to complete the full tutorial as plans changed and the app I was going to make was no longer needed. The first part of the book that I did use was helpful and easy to read.

Happy Shopping!

When I first received this book, I was put off by the fact that the work flow pipeline was in Modo. Sure companies Like ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) are using it, but the software cost $25 for a 30 day trial and $995-$1195 to actually buy. I found this to be an extremely poor choice, since companies like AutoDesk who produce Maya, 3DStudio Max and XSI have trial version and free versions for students... not to mention half the book is using Blender which is free as is Unity.

Now if you've used 3d software before, you know that you pretty much can do most thing in whichever 3d app your most comfortable with or have available. Once I got over my initial dissatisfaction about Modo, I found this book to be pretty enlightening and helpful. It breaks downs pretty well, taking you through the limitations of designing for i-phones and i-pads and explaining how to build 3d assets, using Modo, but if you've have experience in other applications, you can pretty much just do it in that. Then moving into Blender for animation and finishing it up in Breast.

I wouldn't recommend this book to someone, like myself who's fairly new to 3d. If you have experience in Maya, 3dSM or Modo, then you shouldn't have any problem following it and beginning to create 3d games for the i-phone or i-pad.

Wes McDermott has created an excellent 3D game Art tutorial that is approved by the creators of Unity 3. I was also impressed with the detailed, clean artwork that helps the reader visualize the steps explained on the page. It is apparent that Wes is a talented artist and really knows how to help others master the craft. The reader is guided through the creation of basic skeletons to lightmap resolution, as well as more complicated tasks, helping you to create extremely detailed 3D animation, building up volume through shading, skin textures and how to create game objects using modo. There are too many highlights to list and I can't imagine an author who has worked harder to answer all the questions about this amazing graphic art for your iPhone to help you complete the setup on your own.

A solid tutorial on a standard game development pipeline (minus the coding part). Creating the artwork using modo. Animating using Blender. Piecing together using unity. Looks like it would be useful as a step by step guide once, but I'm not sure how useful it would be as a continuing resource. It has screenshots of specific actions in the above programs, so after redesigns the book may become out of date quickly.