This book is all meat and cuts right to the point - modeling and texturing game weapons like a professional. Written by Christian Chang, lead weapons modeler on America’s Army and now at EA, this book delivers what the reader wants. Starting with a discussion on customizing your modeling application for ease of use, the book emphasizes the importance of employing professional techniques when setting up your project. From there, the chapters concentrate on creating specific weapons - from a samurai sword to a modern high-velocity, fully-automatic machine gun - in a step-by-step progression from simple to complex. Each weapon is modeled, UV mapped, optimized, and finally textured for realism.

Meant for Maya users

this is a good book, but everything is done in maya and if you look at the decription it doesnt say anything about maya or which program it uses.

i only found out when i opened it, the methods are the same but for a avid 3d max or lightwave fan you may feel a bit cheated.

but i have to say the reffereance pictures are excellent, orathgraphic projections and high quailty photos of normally missed details.

this book is for a beginer-imtermidiate lvl.

awful quality

I was pretty excited to get this book, I had been looking and needing something on this topic. The problem though is, ugh, the production quality is just awful on this book. The book looks like it was a black and while xerox copy of a book using 1970’s copying technology. The all-important pictures which are the very heart of this book (the book is like 90% pictures, 10% text) are just barely legible. Not only are they not in color but in many cases they are extremely washed out. And for $40 (the msrp) a book this small and of this poor a quality is just a debacle. Shame on you guys, next time you publish a book, this one will haunt you.

Aside from the Black and White pages

I really enjoyed this book, other than the black and white pages. I found the tutorials quite thorough and helpful. The book helped me figure out the modeling and texturing process quite well. Perhaps if the author had chosen another publisher he would have gotten full color pages printed. Sometimes the publisher makes the final decision not the author. But if you are buying this book just be prepared for black and white pages vs. color.

quality issues

I usually read reviews and not write them but in this case I feel I had to, this is not the cheapest book around and it doesnt go through that many projects (small form factor, lots of pics for each step), granted nothing wrong with that it omits nothing and actually shows you uv mapping and texturing can be fun and easy (if you do simple non organic models-and thats what the title says). There are several problems though- I dont know about most people but I dont have time to read while looking at the CD that has all the images on the computer, I just have the book with me. The paper is light not glossy, there are no colors, and worst of all I cant tell whats shown in half the screenshots- when youre visual like me you go by the pics along with the text, not just the text. Im sure the author saw a copy of the book before it was mass printed and realized all it would take would be to darken maya’s background for the objects and cursors to show up better, not asking for color here although that would be nice when showing a brown wood texture...

Not What I expected

I just received this book about 30min ago. Of course I was excited and immediately opened and gave it a once over. The first thing I noticed was the book is in black and white. Everything! This makes it hard to recreate the skins the author is producing unless you’re planning on making them all monochromatic. I didn’t check the companion CD that came with the book so I can’t comment on that. The modeling portion is using Maya so if you want to learn how to create models, map and unwrap in Maya than this might be the book for you. If you want to learn how to create the skins for any weapon that there are better books out there and I suggest you look else where if that’s what you’re looking for.