Product Description

This book takes you outside the studio and walks you through the museum of life. This full color book combines traditional texture creation principles with digital texturing techniques to enhance your scenes and animations. In the first half of the book, you will learn about the history of textures in fine art and in the second half, how to apply these principles to your 2D and 3D digital scenes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #178932 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 360 pages

From the Publisher
If you are involved in the world of 3D in any way—or even if you're simply a student of art and design theory—please take a look at this book. It's an amazing piece of work, exploring the theory and practice of applying texturing maps and paint effects to models and scenes. Yet somehow that doesn't do the book justice, possibly because author Owen Demers grounds his discussion in such solid fundamental ground that the book comes off as equal parts museum catalog, art school text, and industry profile. Face it, most 3D students and professionals have limited skill sets in art theory; yet these people are expected to turn out ever-higher quality work to keep up with audience expectations. We're beyond the days of dancing gasoline pumps... the release of Final Fantasy signals a new benchmark for mass-audience expectations of realistic quality in 3D. Want to know how to do this stuff right? Check out [digital] Texturing & Painting. Each edition of the New Riders [digital] series addresses a distinct discipline: Character Animation; Lighting & Rendering; and now Texturing & Painting (editions on modeling, compositing, and more are in development). What makes Owen Demers such an expert? He's the guy behind the incredible surface texturing in Bingo, the proof-of-concept digital short made with Alias|Wavefront's Maya when it first released. I still remember people walking out of the theatre at SIGGRAPH shaking their heads in disbelief after seeing the hair, the pores on the skin of the characters... "How did they DO that?" Owen teaches you what you need to know before you fire up your software.

About the Author
Owen Demers has worked as an illustrator, graphic designer, 3D artist, and art director for a number of commercial and professional studios in both traditional and computer graphics. Among his many award-winning projects is the animated short Bingo, for which he was the lead texturer and lighting TD. He currently works as a 3D artist and art director in New York. Christine Urszenyi, contributing author and editor, has worked as an architect, art director for film studios and furniture designer. She currently works as a writer in Toronto, Canada.

Customer Reviews

texture but not as we know it
this book takes an new approach to introducing its readers to texture creation. If your expecting a step by step photoshop tutorial your in for a surprise, this book actually help show you how to look at textures and surfaces to see why they are the way they are, then gives ideas on how to recreate these effects and details on your computer. The first half of the book covers the look of textures and how they are affected by there surroundings as in the lighting, the enviroment and the mood you want to create.

The second half is made up of tutorials which show you how to apply the techniques you saw in the first. It mixes the use of scanning and standard 2d tool (eg photoshop, illustrator) and 3d surfaces (procedurals) to give you ideas on how to make most out of what you have. Overall a very good book, its clearly laid out with an easy to read style and all in glorious colour, it helps you look at things differently and add a little more imagination to your textures.

So if your into 3d and are making your own textures, do yourself a favour and get a copy.

An invaluable resource
I bought this book, along with Digital Lighting and Rendering, and found these two volumes to contain an impressive body of knowledge. Aside from being beautiful books in themselves, well printed, good typography, etc., they discuss in detail their subjects from a theoretical, ARTISTIC point of view instead of mere button-pushing, something you don't see much when dealing with books covering 3D. But they don't stop there ... they illustrate and explain in well-written, lucid terms how to apply this theory to your 3D work. Once you understand the reasons behind a 3-light set-up, for example, you can adapt this scheme to your own work and won't need to be spoon-fed input values to position your lights correctly. On the texturing side, you are first encouraged to SEE and understand what you are seeing, to use the real world as a reference. Then and only then should you interpret your vision in your software.

These books won't teach you the software, you pretty much have to know this already, or be in the process of learning it, but it does approach the various techniques by addressing their application among the major platforms.

If you are serious about improving your 3D skills and want to feel a real sense of mastery, I would highly recommend these two books ... they are well-worth the investment. I plan on reading them both several times and keeping them handy for reference and inspiration.

A treasure to be referred to often
Some reviewers have underappreciated this book. I can understand why. The introduction is slow and wordy. It could have used a good edit to tighten it up. As for expectations, a lot of readers are looking for a magical formula to create good textures. But for most readers, that is putting the cart before the horse. You must first recognize what is a good texture. You must see it in artwork. You must see it in the real world. You must learn to see it in your own mind as you do your own modeling and artwork. That is the core concept that this book teaches you: how to see and appreciate textures. Once that is set forth, there are tutorial chapters at the end that demonstrate texture layering and mapping, placement of these, and so forth. Yes, I'll admit it. When I started this book, I was thinking of returning it. Now that I've read and digested most of it, I view it as a treasure to be revisited often. As a final comment, I recently attended a seminar on how to get into digital art. A number of people in the audience trumpeted the value of this book. Enough said.