the best | Digital Texturing and Painting ([digital])

Excelent | Digital Texturing and Painting ([digital]) | Owen Demers

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	• Digital Texturing and Painting ([digital]) Owen Demers New Riders Press, 2001 - 360 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Useful Book, Mostly an Art Book not a CG Book

This is a useful book, written by an experienced artist. Most of the book was really about art itself, how to see and notice details in real life the way an artist would. Only the last chapter really got into specifics about painting textures in Photoshop or specific types of maps.

If you want a book where most of it tells you how to think like an artist, then this is for you. If you wanted a book that went into more detail about how to unwrap UVs on a model or specific texture painting techniques, you'd be dissapointed.

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.

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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.

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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.

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This book is Wonderful A+ + + recommended

I loves this book. It has truly taight me how to see texture and how to bring digital painting to life. This book will help you in all areas of art which can be used in real life painting, digital painting, 3D art and more. I f you need help Understanding how to get your art to that realism point then this book is defintly for you 100%.

You can only gain and loose nothing by reading this book-

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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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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