Customer Reviews

Game Character Design Complete: Using 3ds Max 8 and Adobe Photoshop CS2

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This book is bad. The character built wastes so many polygons that using their technique you will easily create a character with four time the amount of polygons of that of a regular game character and with a quarter of the detail. All this book can do is create bad habbits and you would be much better off not giving this a second thought. Every thing taught here can pretty much be found in any other 3Ds Max book and with much better and less confusing detail. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY OR TIME HERE

Just like all the other books from this publisher the tutorials are badly written with many holes in the descriptions. After much frustration I have started to use the tutorials in Help, which have proved much easier to understand.

Low poly modeling is certainly a technique that warrants discussion. Unfortunately, this book glazes over many of the important steps that readers want/need to know in taking the process from start to finish. Some of the techniques shown prove valuable, but the overall coverage of the subject left me wanting for more. There was too much 'hey...how'd you do that?' and not enough 'here's how you do that'. Far too many steps left out. If money's tight...I'd probably keep looking.

I really wanted to like this book. Maybe my expectations were too high, but this book to me is far from the complete character design. It's more of a quick overview. The whole book seems to be written in a let's-get-it-over-with attitude. You can find much better character tutorials online (I did). On top of that, I find the character rather dull looking, especially since he was supposed to be the main character in a game and not just another NPC. The modelling part of the book may be hard to follow for a noob (but that may be true with any written tutorials on modelling. Modelling video tutorials are much easier to follow), the rigging and skinning part is rather confusing and poorly explained, laying UVs too (very little tweeking is done, which is essential in order to have textures without stratching), animation is limited to a few basic moves and the Photoshop part is rather basic (again, this supposed to be the main character, so the textures should reflect that). So all and all, this book is not worth buying, it brings nothing that was not explained in a much better way by someone else - be it an author of another book or an author of an online tutorial.

This book does what it says it does: It explains you how to model a character, how to texture it and how to animate it using the character studio plugin. I would have left the word "Complete" from the title. There are other aspects of character design for example the use of normal maps that aren't discussed in this book. You should take a look at the website of Ben Mathis to get more information about character design for computergames.

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