Name: Digital Texturing & Painting
Media: Soft Cover Book with companion CD
Author: Owen Demers -
http://odemers.com/Publisher: New Riders Publishing
Year: 2002
This is not just a simple book that will teach you about how to use a paint software. In fact, it doesn't show nothing about how to use this kind of software. The author goes beyond that. He shows how to see the world of colors and textures that surrounds us!
This is for me the most important lesson from this book: it opens our eyes to every detail in a surface or something that can be a reference to help paint a texture. This can be an obvious thing for many artists, but for those who is just at the beginning, the book is gonna be a very good surprise.
He begins talking about his experience as a traditional art student who suddenly finds out the computer as a new tool in his desk and brings all those knowledge to the digital world, mixing color theory and everything that he learned as artist.
He dissects a sequence of paintings that he chose, explaining how he sees the colors, strokes and ideas that an artist could have in mind while paints. He puts the words in a way that we can see the images with him and we understand what he is talking about. He comes to his conclusions at the same time that invites us, as readers, to express our own impressions. This happens through "exercises" that help us to understand the bases of the art.
We learn how to really look at something, not only to say if is it beautiful or not, but to feel the art in the way the artist felt it when he was painting.
We have some samples about the colors theory in the book. This helps us to understand how colors work in real and digital life. Also, it shows simple ways to better create our own pallet for texturing. We learn a little about how to combine colors in a more artistic way. We understand how the layer
blend works, indirectly, which can help a lot to edit our images.
I said that he doesn´t teach how to use a 2D paint software, but he starts a real project distributed in the last 9 chapters (this is almost the whole book, I know). He shows all the process he used to conclude this task as a texture painter, with a lot of tips on how to proceed when there are problems in the mesh and other things. This is not a step-by-step guide, but it is enough to understand how the final maps can be achieved, using photo references, oil painting (by hand) and procedural to create every channel that you will need like color, bump, reflection and others that will create your final shader.
All material is related to Maya and Photoshop, but none of that is hard to transpose to the packages of 3D and 2D that you use.
The only opposition to this book is that it needs a more recent revision.
The author could share much more details and information, but this really don't prevents me to give this book a grade of 5 in our review.
It is a great book for who is beginning and fo professional users as well.
Certainly a must have to all 3D artist.
http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Texturing-Painting-Owen-Demers/dp/0735709181
