I saw this book recommended on an art forum, so picked it up the other day. It’s a cross between a Zbrush manual and a series of tutorials.

I have to recommend it, it’s kinda like the missing printed manual but it embeds the functionality of the tools in lots of real work examples.

I picked this up yesterday for the princely sum of £1 in the Bric a Brac shop next to the Roseleaf. It’s £13 on Amazon and worth every penny.

I can’t remember how I found out about this book - I’m sure it was recommended to me. Anyway, I’ve had this book for 4 or 5 years now (first edition), and it is easily my most borrowed book at work. Jeremy Birn is currently a Lighting Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios, (he’s worked on Cars and The Incredibles), so you can be assured he knows his stuff.

The book itself is non-application specific, but deals with light theory (did you know that red things appear closer than blue things, so you can add artificial depth to a scene just by the choice of your lighting colours?), and it’s worth the money if you simply want to learn how to use a simple 3 point light setup for your portfolio.

Anyway, the book is now in its second edition, with a massive amount of new content, so there really is no excuse for me not buying it.

“Digital Lighting and Rendering” (Jeremy Birn)

Technorati Tags: game industry, lighting, Jeremy Birn, rendering

I’ve been meaning for a while to recommend books on RSArt - books that I own personally or have at work, books that I think are useful to games artists. Since I am predominantly a character artist, I suspect that most of the books I own and thus recommend will be character based too.

I’ll start by recommending Stop Staring by Jason Osipa. Stop Staring, whilst targeted towards Maya users, is an incredibly useful book for learning good facial topology no matter what package you use. It explains how expressions are constructed, and covers important aspects in facial animation such as what you should leave OUT of an animation, as well as what you need to actually animate.

This book however is not for total beginners (although I’m sure that you’d still learn something useful). However if you have some limited knowledge and want to improve your understanding of facial animation, then I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Technorati Tags: facial animation, jason osipa, stop staring