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: #250170 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

the best
Being a professional texturer for more than 2 years in game design and later in viz, I can tell you why this book is perhaps the best source about texturing.
It teaches you about exploring the surfaces and its history. Yes, that's it. This may sound too simple, but this is the most crucial and hard part of texturing - making the viewer believe, and believe yourself that this thing exists and has a history. In my opinoin, of course.
Ironically, in cg we start from tools and only much later come to the conclusion that there's a sculpture behind modeling, traditional lighting behind cg lighting and not quite, but painting behind the texturing. Obviously not quite the painting as long as we operate mainly with digitized photos simulating various surfaces.
Even now there's not an "ideal" book about texturing because definitely it must explain the physics of materials first, and then move into shaders attributes. I don't see shaders as something separate from texturing. For example, any vfx guy knows that there are 3 main components for a realistic surface: color, bump\displacement and specular\reflection. And they provide them always for any surface. Yes, every surface reflects. Or that your luminosity\saturation values for the diffuse must be around 20-80% to work well with lighting. Or your diffuse must be black for highly reflective or transparent surfaces. This is not stressed enough in most books for beginners, and there are many other important tips, utterly important. The technical side of texturing mainly lies in knowing photoshop inside out. There are some good tutorials on the net by Stefan-Morrell and Leigh Van Der Byl, I strongly suggest you reading them.
But in the end, you will know the technical side well, and you will come to this level where you almost meditate on the surfaces. Yet experience of course is a factor. They say you become good when you did 1000 renderings. There is some truth in it. But in the end, digital lighting leads you to the world of real-world lighting, modeling to sculpture, and texturing to meditating on real surfaces abd their history. And this is the most important thing in texturing imo.

What More CG Books Need to Be
As a well-versed member of the "Google Images & Clone Stamp" school of texturing, I know full well that knowing all the technical ins and outs of a program doesn't guarantee good results. A strong grounding in fundamental art principles is needed to make proper use of all the technical bells & whistles.

It can be said that Digital Texturing & Painting is too art-heavy, but it's such a critical aspect of good CG that's either glossed over or omitted in other books. Being able to break down & understand all the many elements of a texture so it can be recreated and controlled is of the utmost importance. And learning how to go beyond photos and start working with the infinitely unique number of real world textures you can find or create adds new levels to your texturing work.

The art-based sections as well as the more technical preparation section are geared toward making you think about every aspect of the work and how best to execute it, rather than creating bland textures that have been done a thousand time before.

Although the specific texturing examples are rather short, the author covers the basics of several texturing methods. NURBS, polygons, using projections, using 3D paint software, tiling textures, using Illustrator, using Photoshop, making & scanning in real world objects or just making things from scratch. And the included CD has the PSD files for you to poke around in a figure out how the maps are put together.

Digital Painting & Texturing has the breadth & depth to be a helpful book for texture artists of all levels.

Excelent
This book really takes texturing to a new level. You'll never walk around looking at the things the same way you did.

It describes intensely how to dissect and evaluate a surface, with interesting practical methods to re-create it.

Must read for people who seriously wants to learn about texturing.