Product Description

Game artists, architects, simulation developers, web designers and enthusiasts alike can learn to create everything from bricks to books in Photoshop with this step-by-step instructional guide. Because texture is 99% of what a gamer sees when playing, this topic deserves considerable coverage but has gotten little attention. Unlike anything on the market, this book is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth guide to game texturing with hundreds of high-quality examples. This guide teaches everything a game artist will need to know--from researching textures, basic artistic principles, tools and techniques, to specific step-by-step tutorials that explain how to create textures for a myriad of environments. The goal of this book is to give the reader a guide that will actually help them secure a job as a developer/artist-even providing them with images created using the tutorials that can be used in a portfolio.

* Learn everything you need to create stunning, professional textures from one easy to follow guide which features tutorials and over 500 high-quality images
* Follow the step-by-step tutorials to learn how to create suitable images which you can add to your portfolio and WOW prospective employers
* Companion CD includes sample textures and electronic versions of images you saw in the book-all the tools you need in one place!
* Hit the ground running or get a leg up on the competition with the tips, tricks, and real world examples featured in this comprehensive guide

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27228 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
"After reading this you'll have a far better understanding of what it takes to become successful in the games world..." - Advanced Photoshop, April 2006

"Ahearn's book can and will help you become a much better artist, even if you never did much texturing before." - Apogee Photo Magazine, August 2006

About the Author
Luke Ahearn has over fifteen years of professional game development experience and has served in lead positions such as designer, producer, and art director on seven published game titles including Dead Reckoning and Americas' Army and worked as a background artist at EA. He has authored six books on game development and ran his own computer game company for ten years. Currently, he is the Art Director and partner of ICPU.

Customer Reviews

Good book, Photoshop only
This is a pretty decent book if you are just becoming interested in texturing for 3D games. However, if you are one of the many people on a budget who don't have Photoshop, and are planning to try to 'translate' the techniques to another program like Gimp or PaintShop Pro - Save your money. There is little explanation for how to come up with the varying effects created in this book. Instead, there is often a list of steps to take in Photoshop with little explanation as to why those steps result in the desired output. Everything that's generally applicable to texturing for games could probably be collected in a day or two of web surfing.

If, however, you are a proud Photoshop owner and can follow along with the given steps, and see how they change the results at each stage, you will likely learn a lot about how to create realistic textures.

good textures
the final textures are excellent. the only problem is sometimes the insructions are a little vague and the software in the book is outdated

For a beginner, I'm very impressed.
There's a lot to like about a book like this for the beginning texture artist, such as myself. It gives you the fundamentals of how to recreate a texture from the ground up without actually having to paint hardly anything! Just use what Photoshop has to offer and you can follow this book all the way through.
That would be the downside though, must have Photoshop! If you don't then I wouldn't see you getting much out of this book except the techniques, which may or may not be done in another paint program.
This is just a beginner's book because it doesn't cover anything about skin or human painting and texturing, which is what I'm now looking for in another book. This just covers inanimate objects, but it just blows my mind how easy it now is using his techniques. I'm no longer intimidated by a blank white screen with no textures, and am now cranking stuff out a lot better looking (not professional yet, but getting there).
Deffinantly worth getting for beginners or people apprehensive towards texturing.