Customer Reviews

The Dark Side of Game Texturing

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Anyone considering purchasing this who has bought David Franson's other book "2D Artwork and 3D Modelling for Game Artists" should think again. This book is just a much smaller version of that. I bought them both, and I was quite disappointed that David would just blatantly copy his other work. There are a few different tutorials but it's not worth paying the price, get the other book instead.

If you're like me, new to texturing with a bit of Photoshop experience and not much of an artist, you'll appreciate how this book starts slowly and builds to more and more interesting and challenging projects. You'll be surprised and pleased at what Franson can guide you into doing with so little effort on your part. You'll be pleased at finally using parts of Photoshop that you've looked at, but never tried. I think this is a great book to get you started texturing and producing some great results fast.

One great thing that I haven't seen mentioned but shouldn't be ignored is that the author has generously given us hundreds of his own digital photos on the CD to help get us started texturing right away.

However, there are a few problems, some of which people have already mentioned here. First, this book is Photoshop-specific, and that means _no_ Photoshop Elements. Some things just plain won't work with Elements (The open-source Gimp is a great workaround, even though you'll spend a lot of time learning the program itself).

Second, you really need to follow this book in sequential order. If you start with Chpt. 5, you'll find that the explanations are incomplete: Franson says things like "I did this just like in Chpt. 3). Fair enough, I don't need my hand held all the way, but the truth is that many people will skip the chapters that deal with textures they aren't interested in.

Third, this book stops with Photoshop. Someone mentioned not being satisfied with his/her results when imported into Maya, and I can report the same experience with UnrealEd. You'll learn how to make a texture look great in Photoshop, but things change when you go to import them into other applications. Franson gives a quick gloss of different editors and engines, but this really isn't a book about how to get your textures all the way into a game. But then there are so many games out there and so many possible applications of the textures, that maybe it's impossible for one book to be all things to all people.

So to sum up, I had a great experience with what this book gave me, but it left me wanting more, more, more!

I am big on textures for games and 3D. And this one was eagerly anticipated to say the least. I truly wish I was about to write a glorious review, because that would mean I had another new favourite book - but alas that is not so.

First a gripe. Why is it that 80% of the people who write books like this come more across as somebody looking for a job (and using the book as leverage for that), rather than the seasoned pro with several high profile jobs behind them? This seems to be another one.

David Franson takes us through a couple of different scenarios from a lackluster medieval fantasy tutorial to a few weapons tutorials, and ends up with the most interesting piece in the book, a dark futuristic wall tutorial (think Doom 3). However the level of specifications aimed for makes you wonder. At the moment, the world is eagerly awaiting Half Life 2, and Doom 3 will come out just in a few weeks. The texturing work in the current generation of FPS 3D games makes the stuff in this book look laughable. I know the book is fairly recently published, still it is only aiming for quality of work along the lines of Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

So when the users will painstakingly sit and make very dimensional textures, alluding to a lot of shapes and objects beyond the geometry, then they'll quickly and rudely find out that that was ten years ago. These days you have polygons enough for the pipes on your walls.

This seems to completely escape the author, which immediately gives it away as newbie work. So if you are expecting professional grade texture work from this book, don't bother we are unfortunately not even talking skilled mod skinner level, more like hopeful new joiner of mediocre mod team quality level.

I showed the book to my texturing lecturer, who is fresh out of the games industry (where she worked as a texture artist), and immediately the beginners mistakes were jumping at her. Guys, there is nothing in this book you can't find better and more up to date on the web. If you are lost for where to look, check out CG Talk. Or go pick up Matthew Omernick's superb book Creating the Art of the Game, which for once was written by an expert (he worked on Medal of Honor and is now Art Director with Lucasarts - not just gave up his programming or law career like David Franson here), and truly shows it.

I bought this book primarily to get information on texturing for 3D software projects. A lot of it is done in photoshop, so if you don't have that program (or maybe Corel Draw, or something similiar) I am not sure how useful it can be.

Tutorials in the book work you through steps to make a seemingly complicated texture easy enough to learn and do. No other graphic or 3D books I have are as good as this one as far as just dealing with textures and how to make them.

Think of it as one of the Photoshop WOW books, but all about textures. And not just squares, but how to apply textures as maps, and how to combine textures (one of the strengths of this book) into something believable, such as a dungeon door, scifi control panels, ammo boxes, or crates, etc.

This book is primarily written for people useing textures in games, and some of the gaming technical information won't be useful to 3D artists, but if you want some ideas and instructions on how to make better textures for 3D programs (Maya, Truespace, Bryce, whatever you use) this book will be helpful.

I'm not quite new at texturing, but this stuff is great. I can't believe what Photoshop can do, and David Franson totally delivers. The textures are mostly made from scratch, sometimes utilizing a photo element, but the end result is a believable, photo-realistic texture. New 3D games use painted 3D objects but still the walls and whatnot need to be textured-- if you follow this book, you can make it all. My art school even bought 30 copies to use as a resource. Great buy!!! A++++!!!!!

Although quite adept in Photoshop, I thought this book gave me more "lessons" then I thought initially possible. Overall, I thought it was an excellent read as one can read this over a weekend sitting in front of the computer and replicating each step 1 by 1, or just out on the couch for fun. From the author's insights into game texturing, I was able to quickly gleam how I could instantly recreate the same effects and now am confident discussin game texturing techniques with anyone. I don't generally write reviews, but this one was worth it. This is definitely a good book for anyone who wants to UP their skills and deepen their knowledge.

I found this book to be some-what dated and the examples of textures to create suitable if your planning to put them into a game of late 90's graphical quality, at least thats what the demonstation photos look like anyway, I was very dissapointed at the overall texture qualities.

There is also random bits of information about weapons and things which are totally unrelated to textures all together and although I'm sure there fascinating I didn't buy this book to find out about the history of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

A lot of the "free" texture photos provided on the CD are, in my opinion, quite useless, they are either framed on a random angle cutting out useful parts, partially out of focus or heavily shadowed.

I was very disappointed with this title and would reccommend buying - 3D Game Textures by Luke Ahearn if you are looking for a good professional standard book to teach you how to make quality game textures.

I'm currently in the process of learning game art and its limitations in my off time so I can, someday, break into the game industry. This book is right up my alley because I'd like to be an environment/asset artist and this book covers texturing of several typical environments you'll find in today's games and some texturing of some basic assets you'd find in those particular settings.

Personally speaking, I learned a lot from this book and the techniques made sense to me, a fairly seasoned photoshop user, and I was able to re-create the authors textures picture-perfect (which do not look ugly, as another reviewer claims his were...sucks for you, pal). That, to me, is the biggest plus of this book. The instructions were clear and concise enough that I was able to follow them easily and come out with textures that were accurate to the examples in the book. Kudos to David's hard work to make that a reality for the people who use this book as their starting point to learn game texturing. It's a good mix of pictures to compare along the way and written instruction, but you're not overly burdened by reading and then doing. David does a good job of explaining to you why you are doing what you're doing instead of listing every step to get the texture to look as the example does. Understanding why you do what you do is priceless.

I'm currently in the middle of Luke Ahearn's "3D game textures" book and I can't, for the life of me, figure out some of the instructions in the book and the outcome I'm seeing not matching the examples...to me, that is frustrating as all get out and it's unfortunate as it's a newer book that supposedly has more current techniques used by today's game artists. I've yet to finish the book, so I can only hope those issues are cleared up later in the book. This alone makes the book much less appealing than The Dark Side of Game Texturing already. One other things is that, gasp, the techniques in this book and Luke's (which seems to be getting nothing but 5-star ratings...) are very similar minus a few slight differences. Interesting.

Overall, I'd say the techniques in this book are far from dated, but are integral for laying the groundwork to learning game texturing. People forget that not all developers out there have access to the latest generation hardware and utilize these 'old' techniques all the time and rely heavily on them to create their games so they look and play beautifully. Just as a fine artist must never forget the basics when creating beautiful masterpieces, digital artists must also have a solid understanding of the basics in the digital realm, and also of fine art. You may be able to create anything digitally these days, but only an artist who understands what makes art great will be able to stand out from the rest of the wannabe game artists out there.

These approached for things are unfortunately a bit dated and I felt reading through the text that things were going to be a bit cookie cutter. With new practices such as normal mapping, specularity mapping and such, this book covers the most basic of steps in texturing without going into much theory about how to create procedural textures to a great degree of detail.

I would recommend getting Digital Texturing and Painting by Owen Demers as your primer to interpret what you see in the real world and my school teaches and recommends 3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop. The work I have seen the students in the game texturing class at my school is very impressive and it looks a much higher caliber of work than what could be done learning from this Dark Side book.

If you want to lean to texture anything using Photoshop, try this book. David starts off with general explanations of how-to's and parameters required for various game engines. Then each chapter is filled with great texture examples-- he starts of easy, using Photoshop techniques I've never used, and creates cool textures mostly from scratch or using photo elements as a base (as most texture artists do). There's even a couple of small sections that show a 3D model unwrapped and textured. I highly recommend this book if you want to learn how to texture anything.