3D Game Environments Create Professional 3D Game Worlds Luke Ahearn
0-240-80895-9padElsevier/Focal Press 9780240808956 0240808959May-08
List Price: $49.95padPaperbackpad374 pagespadCD or DVD included.
Our Price: $39.96pad
From a modern city to a steamy jungle, learn about the planning and technological considerations for 3D modeling, UV layout, and creating textures that goes into developing a realistic and appealing game environment with:

  • The entire game world development process: from planning to modeling and texturing.
  • Exercises and projects to practice with: each section includes projects to practice creating different world genres.
  • CD with source art to practice with and use in your own projects, program demos, and plug-ins.

    The ultimate resource to help you create triple-A quality art for a variety of game worlds; 3D Game Environments offers detailed tutorials on creating 3D models, applying 2D art to 3D models, and clear concise advice on issues of efficiency and optimization for a 3D game engine. Using Photoshop and 3ds Max as his primary tools, Luke Ahearn explains how to create realistic textures from photo source and uses a variety of techniques to portray dynamic and believable game worlds.

    Contents: THE BASICS; Optimizations; 3D Concepts; Shaders; LOW POLYGON ENVIRONMENTS WITH SIMPLE SHADERS; Introduction to the low polygon large urban area; Modeling the Large Urban Environment; Texturing the Large Urban Environment; TERRAIN, FOLIAGE, AND MORE ADVANCED ASSET CREATION; Introduction to the Outdoor Environment and More Advanced Asset Creation; Terrain in Virtual Environments; Outdoor Asset Creation; The Jungle Base, an exercise using outdoor and advanced assets; Normal Mapping and advanced shader usage



    Luke Ahearn has over 15 years of professional game development experience and has served in lead positions such as designer, producer, and art director on 7 published game titles, including Dead Reckoning and America's Army and worked as a background artist at EA. He has authored 7 books on game development (including Focal's 3D Game Textures, and 3D Game Environments) and ran his own computer game company for 10 years. Currently, he is the Art Director and partner of ICPU.