Books about Texturing from Amazon.com

If you already understand the basics of Maya, the industry-leading 3D animation and effects software, you’ll be ready to move on to the sophisticated topics in this updated edition of Advanced Maya Texturing and Lighting. Detailed, easy-to-follow instructions will teach you the real-world production secrets that professional animators use to achieve amazing results. In the second edition, you will find extensive and updated coverage of the latest theories and trends in addition to an enclosed CD with exclusive content to help you sharpen your skills..
Price: $32.36 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that is a real alternative to commercially available 3D design software A cross-platform software package with millions of downloads annually, Blender is now one of the world's most popular 3D design tools.

Although Blender is free, it's intended for design professionals and others motivated to become 3D artists. The Essential Blender will provide you with the knowledge you need to help integrate Blender into your work and begin to master its powerful creation tools.

If you've never tried 3D design before, an introductory chapter will familiarize you with relevant terminology and concepts. If you're already experienced with commercial 3D software, The Essential Blender will get you up to speed with Blender quickly. After a tour of Blender's 3D modeling, animation, and rendering capabilities, you'll learn how best to use Blender for these tasks:

Object manipulation and animation

Mesh and sculpt modeling and shape animation

Materials and texturing (including UV unwrapping)

Lighting and rendering

Particle animation

Character rigging and animation

Node-based composition

The book is modular in its approach, with each topic addressed independently and accompanied by hands-on tutorial sections.

The combined expertise of key members of the Blender community, coupled with the experience of editor Roland Hess, bring you The Essential Blender-the definitive guide to Blender. You'll find a wealth of 3D design information inside that will help you to unlock your artistic potential and get the most out of Blender.

Includes a Complete Version of Blender 2.44 on the CD-ROM. Covers Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (x86 and PowerPC), Solaris, FreeBSD, and IRIX..
Price: $26.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Let this in-depth professional book be your guide to Blender, the powerful open-source 3D modeling and animation software that will bring your ideas to life. Using clear step-by-step instruction and pages of real-world examples, expert animator Tony Mullen walks you through the complexities of modeling and animating, with a special focus on characters. From Blender basics to creating facial expressions and emotion to rendering, you’ll jump right into the process and learn valuable techniques that will transform your movies.

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file..
Price: $20.54 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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.

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Price: $33.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Charred ruins, bullet holes, rusted metal - if you're a fan of 3D first-person-shooter games, then you're familiar with those amazing, ominous textures that draw you into your character's surroundings Get ready to analyze - and re-create - the textures and graphics used in these games. All you need is a decent PC, Photoshop, and a digital camera. Once you learn how to create the textures within this book, you can create any texture for any game. Not a born artist? That's okay. You'll learn how to let Photoshop do most of the work. Begin with texturing basics, including pixel sizes, color modes, and alpha channels. Then jump right into hearty texture tutorials as you create everything from sci-fi backgrounds and molten lava to medieval castle walls and dragon skin. If you're ready to travel to the grim back alleys of your imagination, then you're ready for "The Dark Side of Game Texturing"..
Price: $21.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Well-known Maya professional, Michael Ingrassia, takes readers through his unique style of modeling: "Image Based Modeling" where efficient, realistic models can be created very quickly Ingrassia's techniques allow modelers to create exact replicas of their concept characters or objects. The techniques presented are very efficient and allow game modelers to quickly build out stand alone props to populate environments and game levels.

Presented are tried and true techniques that the author has used successfully in game production for the past 10 years. Most, if not all 3D books, focus on basic "box" modeling techniques, which are the basis for proper 3D modeling but not the complete solution. In the author's experience, students who have learned through the Image Based Modeling brand, have quickly excelled into effective modelers.

One of the hardest things for any modeler to do is match their model EXACTLY to the concept art or photos they are provided. The insider tips in this book walk artists through this process. Artists begin with basic modeling and advance to a creating a complete scene and set design/game level. Rather than including sporadic models with zero association from to one another, each model in the book becomes an integral part of an overall theme realistic in game development today.

The accompanying DVD includes 8 exclusive video tutorials on advanced Maya techniques as bonus tracks for artists providing invaluable modeling, rigging and texturing samples. Also, an in-depth video on assembling a "Killer Demo Reel" showing simple but effective video editing techniques used by the author so that artists can learn how to get their work seen. The book not only teaches effective methodology, but provides the user with impressive content for producing effective demo reels and portfolios. Pros and cons of demo reel, website and artist representation are given, along with insights into the expectations of game studios today. The video tutorials show users the finished product, and then run through the process of step by step creation of that particular technique.

--Author Ingrassia is a veteran artist and instructor (Senior Artist on several XBox game projects; and Senior Maya Instructor for Escape Studios in London, considered the top training academy in Europe; with game credits including Shadowrun (2007), Azurik: Rise of Perathia (2001), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001), Electronic Arts, Inc.) He provides insider secrets, tips, and tricks so that artists can learn a wide variety of cutting-edge modeling and texturing techniques.

--The latest Next-Gen modeling techniques combined with "tried and true" processes provide a leg up for artists new to game work so that they can "hit the ground running" with professional results. + DVD with bonus videos on advanced modeling techniques.

--Game Industry professionals speak about their experiences and advice providing artists with candid, unique insights into the game industry (how they broke in, and how they stayed in).

--Coverage of Autodesk's newly acquired MUDBOX software, so that artists can learn quick and effective sculpting techniques to make use of this exciting and powerful tool that can add a professional look to their models. (Ingrassia has been working with Mudbox for years - he recently gave a lecture on the tool at an animation festival in Prague. His expertise will come through in the book.).
Price: $48.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Texturing: Concepts and Techniques is about the aesthetics and design issues of creating and using interesting textures for digital 3D animation. This beautifully illustrated, full color book teaches artists how to create stunning and convincing textures using the popular 3ds max TM , Maya ® , and LightWave 3D ® programs. It describes the theory behind many aspects of the software, to give artists a deeper understanding of the technology, and its past, present, and future. It helps readers understand the limitations that 3D animation places on creating quality imagery, and details the artistic techniques behind creating convincing textures, not just realistic or photorealistic ones. The tutorials and techniques included throughout the book don't just show users how to recreate a texture, but take them deep into the tools of the programs to help them really understand how and why they work. After working through the tutorials, users will be able to take their skills to the next level and create their own stunning textures!.
Price: $5.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The third edition of this classic tutorial and reference on procedural texturing and modeling is thoroughly updated to meet the needs of today's 3D graphics professionals and students. New for this edition are chapters devoted to real-time issues, cellular texturing, geometric instancing, hardware acceleration, futuristic environments, and virtual universes. In addition, the familiar authoritative chapters on which readers have come to rely contain all-new material covering L-systems, particle systems, scene graphs, spot geometry, bump mapping, cloud modeling, and noise improvements. There are many new spectacular color images to enjoy, especially in this edition's full-color format.

As in the previous editions, the authors, who are the creators of the methods they discuss, provide extensive, practical explanations of widely accepted techniques as well as insights into designing new ones. New to the third edition are chapters by two well-known contributors: Bill Mark of NVIDIA and John Hart of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on state-of-the-art topics not covered in former editions.

An accompanying Web site (www.texturingandmodeling.com) contains all of the book's sample code in C code segments (all updated to the ANSI C Standard) or in RenderMan shading language, plus files of many magnificent full-color illustrations.

No other book on the market contains the breadth of theoretical and practical information necessary for applying procedural methods. More than ever, Texturing & Modeling remains the chosen resource for professionals and advanced students in computer graphics and animation.

*New chapters on: procedural real-time shading by Bill Mark, procedural geometric instancing and real-time solid texturing by John Hart, hardware acceleration strategies by David Ebert, cellular texturing by Steven Worley, and procedural planets and virtual universes by Ken Musgrave.
*New material on Perlin Noise by Ken Perlin.
*Printed in full color throughout.
*Companion Web site contains revised sample code and dozens of images..
Price: $76.73 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This completely updated edition is written to teach 3D artists, designers, and animators how to add realism to their character's expressions. It begins by covering the anatomy of the human head, facial features, and facial muscles and progresses to cover recreating the human face and muscle structure in 3D and making it move in a realistic, believable fashion. It is filled with detailed instruction for lip synching and creating visual expressions for speech and sound under a variety of conditions (sad, happy, stuttering, etc.). It provides visual reference charts of morph targets for weighted human expressions, typical human phonemes, cartoon expressions, facial expressions, and just-for-fun cartoon expressions. This edition includes two new chapters covering 3ds Max and Maya. All of these techniques can also be applied to your own aliens, animals, creatures, and other animated creations. If you want your characters to have truly realistic facial expressions, you'll learn everything you need to know in this indispensable resource..
Price: $14.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]