I’m looking for a general book on 3D modeling and animating. I am not an artist, or animator or modeler or anything of the sort but I really want to understand more about the process. I’m a sound designer and composer who works for a game development company and I really want to learn more about art and the processes and tools you guys use to make it. Some things I find particularly confusing are how you texture objects, what size and type of assets you’re exporting and importing, and what exactly modeling is?
Polys, meshes, normals, vertices, rigs, textures… Pretty much I want to be able to talk to an artist and at least be able to somewhat understand what they’re talking about.
Maybe such a book doesn’t exist but I thought I would ask here. I’ve been reading everything I can find on this forum for the past few weeks and I love looking at all of the stuff you guys make. I love the questions too, learning what problems you guys run into kind makes some of what you’re doing seem a little clearer.
Anyway, sorry for the somewhat off topic post, but I’ve been reading all sorts of forums and I really like this place!
I guess most of the books on creating game assets would cover that area.
Although you could really just stick to watching a few online videos/ tutorials and browsing and asking questions in the art sections on here and at other forums and basically just ask as many questions as you can really. You’ll learn a lot more from doing that then reading through a whole book. A lot of artists love to explain how they’ve done things for a piece, or how they work, so yea, just start firing questions and see what you get.
The quickest way to get an understanding is to try it. Download Blender, UV unwrap the default cube, assign an image texture to it and you’ll basically know all you need to (as described in the OP). I haven’t described how to do that obviously but it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to find out and you’d learn a lot more than 2 hours of reading can give you.
Thanks for the tips. I’ve downloaded Blender already and I really like it so far. I’ve used 3DS Max before but mostly for adding animation triggers to be used by the game. I did do a bouncing ball tutorial once though!
I guess I’m looking for more of an overall understanding of what different techniques and words mean, not so much how to do everything myself.
Do you know any good books on creating game assets? I try to talk to the artists, but since I don’t really understand 90 percent of it, which is why I came here. Thanks again for the help!
What sort of computer games are you into ? I personally find that if I like a game, it is easier to find out how they did stuff in the backrooms when you research it.
I came across a nice books about the making of Doom 3d once, which has helped me on several blender “problems”.