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".

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".

Uninspiring.

I purchased this book to continue to develop my digital art abilities, but was completely disappointed. While it would work fine as a teaching tool for someone who had never tried to use Photoshop for texturing, as an intermediately skilled texture artist, the book offered nothing in the way of new material.

One of the things I found most frustrating was the very poor art used in examples. The textures he uses look incredibly flat with bad color balance through-out the scene and far too much frustrating repetition. It looks as though he may have spent 20 minutes per texture. The exception to this rule is the texture at the end of the book which is interesting, but don’t spend your money for a single good tutorial.

I would have really appreciated some texture painting tips and techniques, but he doesn’t really touch on them. He doesn’t really mention how light plays with different objects (specularity etc.), which is completely essential to creating believable textures.

On the plus side, if you’ve never made a texture in your life, the book will certainly give you a base to start from, and introduce some of the most basic concepts you will need to know. But anyone else (and including the above mentioned nOObs), don’t waste your money. There are far better tutorials to be found on the internet, and they are in an abundance.

Terrible

Easily the worst piece of literature on game design I’ve ever seen. Don’t even buy it second hand. My University has a pretty good collection of Game Design books in the learning resource center, though when browsing online I noticed this was missing. I foolishly bought it for the full price. A few weeks on I wish I’d spent the money on a decent book, or even some lottery tickets.

Avoid at all costs.

Awful

A very basic book that will teach you how to make cheap looking and redundant graphics for games using questionable techniques. Nothing here which you couldn’t learn to a greater degree by self-teaching or by reading any of the masses of free photoshop and game engine tutorials here on the information superhighway. Avoid.

Comedy gold

David Franson does a fantastic job of showing aspiring texture artists how to strive for ever greater levels of mediocrity in this book, which amounts to little more than a printed compilation of the basic free tutorials you could find in 20 minutes of Google searching.

The example textures Franson walks you through are pretty basic and lame, and the included images on the CD are hilarious by themselves. For example, a lot of them have a major case of flash burn or other serious irregularities that make them very bad source material for your own textures-no amount of cloning or doctoring can salvage a nicely tiling texture out of many of the images on the CD. You’re better off building your own collection of source and reference images by searching for "Mayang" and "CGTexture" on Google.

However, it is not without redeeming value-it’s a great comedic read if you’re a more experienced texture artist than the author. That bar, if this book is anything to go by, is pretty low.

Useful, to a degree

This is certainly a useful book, no doubt about it - but it’s nowhere near as useful as it likes to think it is. Quite apart from containing significantly fewer techniques than I had expected, the quality of the textures produced is disappointing; after all, if one orders a book to improve one’s work, the book should be of a higher level, right?

Useful for beginners, but this is by no means an in-depth or advanced book. It’s a starting point, not a handbook.

Great place to start for learning the basics of game texture creation

I’m currently in the process of learning game art and its limitations in my off time so I can, someday, break into the game industry. This book is right up my alley because I’d like to be an environment/asset artist and this book covers texturing of several typical environments you’ll find in today’s games and some texturing of some basic assets you’d find in those particular settings.

Personally speaking, I learned a lot from this book and the techniques made sense to me, a fairly seasoned photoshop user, and I was able to re-create the authors textures picture-perfect (which do not look ugly, as another reviewer claims his were...sucks for you, pal). That, to me, is the biggest plus of this book. The instructions were clear and concise enough that I was able to follow them easily and come out with textures that were accurate to the examples in the book. Kudos to David’s hard work to make that a reality for the people who use this book as their starting point to learn game texturing. It’s a good mix of pictures to compare along the way and written instruction, but you’re not overly burdened by reading and then doing. David does a good job of explaining to you why you are doing what you’re doing instead of listing every step to get the texture to look as the example does. Understanding why you do what you do is priceless.

I’m currently in the middle of Luke Ahearn’s "3D game textures" book and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out some of the instructions in the book and the outcome I’m seeing not matching the examples...to me, that is frustrating as all get out and it’s unfortunate as it’s a newer book that supposedly has more current techniques used by today’s game artists. I’ve yet to finish the book, so I can only hope those issues are cleared up later in the book. This alone makes the book much less appealing than The Dark Side of Game Texturing already. One other things is that, gasp, the techniques in this book and Luke’s (which seems to be getting nothing but 5-star ratings...) are very similar minus a few slight differences. Interesting.

Overall, I’d say the techniques in this book are far from dated, but are integral for laying the groundwork to learning game texturing. People forget that not all developers out there have access to the latest generation hardware and utilize these ’old’ techniques all the time and rely heavily on them to create their games so they look and play beautifully. Just as a fine artist must never forget the basics when creating beautiful masterpieces, digital artists must also have a solid understanding of the basics in the digital realm, and also of fine art. You may be able to create anything digitally these days, but only an artist who understands what makes art great will be able to stand out from the rest of the wannabe game artists out there.

Not bad for an old book written by a non-artist

I am a traditional artist with some photoshop skills. I am new to texturing however and this book is a nice beginners book. The techniques he shows are helpful if you are a texturing n00b like me.

However the results he provides are so ugly that it is hard to be inspired by his efforts. OTOH it doesn’t take much to create better looking textures than he does if you have any artistic training at all and use his techniques.

When I say his results are ugly I don’t mean that they look tattered and decayed - hey that’s the whole point of the book. I mean they are poorly composed and executed.

So while I am glad I bought the book I wouldn’t pay more than $5.00 for it.

Very dated techniques

These approached for things are unfortunately a bit dated and I felt reading through the text that things were going to be a bit cookie cutter. With new practices such as normal mapping, specularity mapping and such, this book covers the most basic of steps in texturing without going into much theory about how to create procedural textures to a great degree of detail.

I would recommend getting Digital Texturing and Painting by Owen Demers as your primer to interpret what you see in the real world and my school teaches and recommends 3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop. The work I have seen the students in the game texturing class at my school is very impressive and it looks a much higher caliber of work than what could be done learning from this Dark Side book.

This book would have been awesome in 1998

This book as really good basic information, although most of the other information is obsolete. Most texture artist(new or vetran) have surpassed this technology long ago. It’s great read for the basics, but beyond that, their are better books.

A good book that doesn’t go quite far enough

If you’re like me, new to texturing with a bit of Photoshop experience and not much of an artist, you’ll appreciate how this book starts slowly and builds to more and more interesting and challenging projects. You’ll be surprised and pleased at what Franson can guide you into doing with so little effort on your part. You’ll be pleased at finally using parts of Photoshop that you’ve looked at, but never tried. I think this is a great book to get you started texturing and producing some great results fast.

One great thing that I haven’t seen mentioned but shouldn’t be ignored is that the author has generously given us hundreds of his own digital photos on the CD to help get us started texturing right away.

However, there are a few problems, some of which people have already mentioned here. First, this book is Photoshop-specific, and that means _no_ Photoshop Elements. Some things just plain won’t work with Elements (The open-source Gimp is a great workaround, even though you’ll spend a lot of time learning the program itself).

Second, you really need to follow this book in sequential order. If you start with Chpt. 5, you’ll find that the explanations are incomplete: Franson says things like "I did this just like in Chpt. 3). Fair enough, I don’t need my hand held all the way, but the truth is that many people will skip the chapters that deal with textures they aren’t interested in.

Third, this book stops with Photoshop. Someone mentioned not being satisfied with his/her results when imported into Maya, and I can report the same experience with UnrealEd. You’ll learn how to make a texture look great in Photoshop, but things change when you go to import them into other applications. Franson gives a quick gloss of different editors and engines, but this really isn’t a book about how to get your textures all the way into a game. But then there are so many games out there and so many possible applications of the textures, that maybe it’s impossible for one book to be all things to all people.

So to sum up, I had a great experience with what this book gave me, but it left me wanting more, more, more!

Dissapointment

You better know photoshop before you buy this book,because the author doesn’t tell you were some of selections are in photoshop. Plus after I managed to make some of the textures which did look good in photoshop, they looked terrible in Maya7 when I rendered the scene. Some of the textures I can not complete because I dont know photoshop that well and I have no idea what the author is talking about or were the selections are that I need to use...

Superb

After reading this book and going through the tutorials, I quickly found myself returning to my already made textures and improving them using the techniques found in this book. I highly recommended this book if you need to make textures that not only look great, but quick and easily for level editing. The texture differences before and after this book are incredible. You will soon feel your Photoshop skills increase dramatically. David explains everything in a simple to understand manor and even takes the trouble of quoting the settings used whenever a filter is applied.

A little too basic

The main emphasis of this book seems to be on photomanips and although there are some textures made from scratch in Photoshop, they don’t tend to look all that great. The book is very easy to follow and includes some very detailed step by step instructions. It’s a quick and dirty way to make textures but that’s all it is. This book is way too basic and dated.

On the accompanying CD there is an additional .pdf tutorial with guides on how to use Photoshop, which from a glance seemed quite good. There are also some source photographs included. Generally these are only useful as reference images however due to their poor quality and size.

If you’re really serious about texturing for games, this isn’t the book you’re looking for. 3D Game Textures by Luke Ahearn is probably a much better choice.

Excellent practical application/implementation of Textures

This book (with free resources) shows us how to make and apply different textures for games. It tells us the size to use for different game engines (most useful).
When using 3d software we usually use a mesh or poly and when transparency is needed we apply it through the materials, but here David Franson shows us that having a texture with an alpha channel we can save time and size. There are many better tips and tricks like this in the book.
Though the UV mapping uses the program ’Right Hemisphere’s DeepUV’ which is okay (and sorts out the problem of which 3d program to use for the Author).

Texturing

I bought this book primarily to get information on texturing for 3D software projects. A lot of it is done in photoshop, so if you don’t have that program (or maybe Corel Draw, or something similiar) I am not sure how useful it can be.

Tutorials in the book work you through steps to make a seemingly complicated texture easy enough to learn and do. No other graphic or 3D books I have are as good as this one as far as just dealing with textures and how to make them.

Think of it as one of the Photoshop WOW books, but all about textures. And not just squares, but how to apply textures as maps, and how to combine textures (one of the strengths of this book) into something believable, such as a dungeon door, scifi control panels, ammo boxes, or crates, etc.

This book is primarily written for people useing textures in games, and some of the gaming technical information won’t be useful to 3D artists, but if you want some ideas and instructions on how to make better textures for 3D programs (Maya, Truespace, Bryce, whatever you use) this book will be helpful.

This is my favourite book!!!

This book covers just about everything you need to know about texturing ANYTHING using Photoshop. Some of his later tutorials are a bit tough but are so totally cool looking. It is all-colour, and very easy to follow. I’ve found that just by following the instructions EXACTLY, the textures work out great and in the end I can make any texture, even general art work. Very cool book, highly recommended. I know future games are going to be geared more towards 3D models instead of faux textures, but texture generation is needed nonetheless. Great book.

Hot book

If you want to lean to texture anything using Photoshop, try this book. David starts off with general explanations of how-to’s and parameters required for various game engines. Then each chapter is filled with great texture examples-- he starts of easy, using Photoshop techniques I’ve never used, and creates cool textures mostly from scratch or using photo elements as a base (as most texture artists do). There’s even a couple of small sections that show a 3D model unwrapped and textured. I highly recommend this book if you want to learn how to texture anything.

My Favourite Book!!!

This book covers just about everything you need to know about texturing ANYTHING using Photoshop. Some of his later tutorials are a bit tough but are so totally cool looking. It is all-colour, and very easy to follow. I’ve found that just by following the instructions EXACTLY, the textures work out great and in the end I can make any texture, even general art work. Very cool book, highly recommended. I know future games are going to be geared more towards 3D models instead of faux textures, but texture generation is needed nonetheless. Great book.