Books 2, 3 and 4 showed up today - I’ll review each one in its own post.

 

So, onto review #2, The Dark Side of Game Texturing. I’ll try and start out positive - the book handles concepts and tutorials in a way that seem geared to the Photoshop beginner - it even has a demo version of PS CS on the included DVD, along with two pages of Photoshop keyboard shortcuts (always good) and, like the book in review #1, takes some time to go over the basics of composition and art, including demos of tileable textures that show repeating patterns.

Unfortunately, the bad outweighs the book’s good merits. Some of the fault isn’t necessarily that of the book - it concentrates highly on creating textures for the Quake 3, Half-Life, Unreal, and Torque engines, and makes no apologies for it. Its absolutely geared towards the PVP shoot ‘em up gamer that wants to make their own mods - a legitimate market, but not one with a lot of stylistic or technical crossover to creating textures for use in SL.  Where this bogs the book down for SL texture artists is the sheer amount of time and print spent on explaining how textures and UV maps work for these engines, what color translates as transparency, how to make sprites for gunshots and blood spatter, animated textures that work in traditional game engines, etc.

Which leads to the next aspect of disappointment - the approach to texturing and the quality/content of the tutorials. I can forgive tutorials that concentrate on a specific genre (in this case, the rusty metals, pipes, and worn crates of the aforementioned games) as long as the quality of the final product, and the techniques taught during the course of the tutorial, are good enough so that one can apply what is learned to other scenarios. This book does neither very well. The actual tutorials are pretty much surpassed in quality by almost anything you can find for free online, plus online you don’t have to flip back two chapters when the author says “repeat what we did in Chapter 3’s tutorial”. Another aspect I really didn’t like, especially after my first book’s review, is that the author overly relies on photosourcing to create things like brick walls, wood, etc. When he does attempt to create a texture without photosourcing, the results are so abysmal you feel like he purposefully half-hearted the effort just so he could skip to ripping a photo. Now I don’t have a problem with photosourcing per se - photos are an invaluable way to add realism to a texture - but with the myriad problems with licensing and copyright, its automatically limiting to restrict yourself to only photosourcing when you could be learning the techniques to create beautiful textures completely from scratch. Not only is scratch 100% legit, but its infinitely more flexible and saves tons of time. For SL artists that want to make sure their work is completely OK for resale or use in projects for pay, this book doesn’t address your needs - again, its target audience is for the hobbiest that wants to play with specific game engines.

After chalking up the book as a general bust, I popped in the DVD to check out the promised royalty-free textures. You aren’t missing anything. They’re all photos, but poorly taken ones (especially if you’ve read the chapter in book #1 about taking photos for your own texture work). Crooked windows, extreme perspective angles, flashbulb burns, stark shadows, backlit signs - just about every photography mistake is on display, making the vast majority of these worthless. Stick with GIS or any of the royalty free online sites.

Overall score is 2 out of 10. If you’re in the target audience for this book and you’re just starting out, you may find some worth out of it, especially if you don’t have an Internet connection. Otherwise there isn’t anything in here you can’t find online for free, and usually of better quality.