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Amazon
3dcognition book page
Category:
Arts/Entertainment
Publisher: Charles River Media
ISBN-10: 1584505486
Pages: 332
Copyright: September 21, 2007
ISBN-13: 9781584505488
This book shows you how to create game art for 3D game engines, step by step.
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Covers 3ds Max, the Torque Game Engine, and Photoshop.
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Introductory chapter on 3ds Max.
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332 pages, written with step-by-step instructions and 241 full-color figures.
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The first half of the book covers modeling, unwrapping, texturing, animating, and exporting game art assets such as simple shapes and pickups.
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The second half of the book covers modeling, unwrapping, texturing, rigging, animating, and exporting game characters.
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In-depth sections on rigging a character with helper bones and proxy objects to minimize vertex collapse.
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Walks the reader through Level Of Detail setup for pickups as well as characters.
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Explains how to export game art to the engine, how to set up scripts, and how to import the art into the engine.
Excerpt
Unwrapping is by no means absolutely necessary for putting a material on a model; the example in Chapter 1, "Introduction to 3ds Max," demonstrates how to apply a custom material to a model. This may be completely adequate for some models and situations, but it almost always results in a general kind of texture that doesn't allow for details like edges of panels, rivets, eyes, wrinkles, and so forth. For more compelling and precise textures, you need to unwrap the model.
Unwrapping is a means of flattening a 3D model so that you can paint on it. It is like taking the skin off a 3D model and laying it flat like a canvas. It is of additional help if the faces you unwrap are right-side up, the way you would normally look at them, so that as you paint them they make sense. Effort and detail in this phase of the process make the texturing phase go that much smoother and ultimately result in better work.
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