NEW BOOK: Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone with Unity

Just seen this on Amazon.co.uk, anyone know anything about it or the author?

Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone with Unity: Featuring modo and Blender pipelines

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creating-Ga...TF8&coliid=I2OE3Q7O2KYD90&colid=2QR8OF002NSOZ

Due for release 26th November 2010

 

You can get more info on the book here:

http://the3dninja.com/blog/

Hope it helps!

The Lorax

 

Thanks for posting, I really need this book!

Just checked authors website, looks like the book is a god send for coders like me!

And the demo he is building for the book is absolutely fantastic.

 

Heh, with a bit more work you can put '7500 verticies, two draw calls, solid 60fps'

 

Hey,

My name is Wes McDermott and I'm the author of the book. I'm very excited about the book's upcoming release. Here's a little background...

The book is set to release in the US in mid October. I'm currently working on the book's companion iPhone / iPad apps, which serves as a playable demo for the content discussed in the book and editing the page proofs. I've been trying to update my blog with the book's progress when time permits so you can find some good info there as well. Thanks The Lorax for posting the link! I'll be releasing some official demo videos and table of contents information on the book's resource site in September, so be on the look out there! There will be information on my blog. http://the3dninja.com/blog

I've been working on the book since the beginning of the year. As for a little info on myself, I've been working as a 3D artist for 10 years and have been working as a multimedia developer for UPS the past 6 years.

I've come to really love Unity as a development tool and I wrote the book to be the guide I wish I had when I first was getting into iPhone development. The book is written from the perspective of an artist's mindset and approach to iPhone development rather than a coder's. However, with that said, the book is not the typical "game art book' where you're led through hundreds of pages of boring step-by-step tutorials on modeling a low-res game character with no regard towards the game engine, coding or the hardware the game will be deployed on. Believe me, I've read my fare share of those type of books and definitely was always left without much of a clue to the actual process.

This book is solely focused on iPhone development and contains very in-depth topics on the iDevice hardware and how it relates to the Unity game engine under the hood. This information is then used throughout the book as we explore the "why" for creating game art specifically optimized for the iPhone and iPad. I say "why" because this book is about establishing solid principles. There aren't any step-by-step tutorials as I'm not a big fan of that type of training. Guided tutorials definitely have their place, but I feel that explaining the "why" behind the process and focusing on fundamental principles and workflow is the quickest and most efficient way to guide readers towards creating their own content for their projects.

The book uses modo for creating and texturing assets and Blender 2.5x for rigging and animation. However, the principles covered are applicable for any 3D application. This particular pipeline was chosen as I personally love modo's modeling toolset and Blender makes a good companion for modo as it provides a free solution for creating skinned meshes, which modo lacks. At my day job, I use Maya, so I'm also influenced by that workflow as well.

The book covers topics such as batching, building on the grid, shaders, compression, skinned meshes, animation blending, dynamics and Beast lightmapping. The book was written with Unity 3.0 and covers both pro and basic licenses with full support for the iPhone 4, iPad and 3rd Generation iDevices.

The book will also have a full resource site with video walkthroughs for each chapter containing more information as well as a bonus video on using Unity's Internal Profiler.

I'd be happy to answer any additional questions as well as talk about the progress of the book or its iPhone app Unity is an amazing product with top-notch developers and a cool community. I'm very excited to be able to have the opportunity to offer something back with this book.

Best Regards,

Wes

 

Hi Wes!

Thanks for the info, good luck with the book, sounds like it will be a must have for iPhone developers!

That will include me soon...

 

Is there an ebook (pdf) version of this book available that we can buy? I only seem to find a printed version (and a Kindle, but I don't do Kindle ).