Creating the Art of the Game

Description
I bought this book because I wanted to know about game art in particular, not 3D art and technique in general. This book gave me exactly what I was looking for. Omernick draws on his extensive experience to show you EXACTLY how game art is put together and how it relates to the rest of game production. He shows you what standard techniques and 3d package features are used in the big name studios. He gave me a bar to measure my own work by and a variety of 3d concepts that I need to know to get into game art. More than anything else, he inspired me by taking the mystery out of the genre and made it graspable. The problem with the other game books is that they are either way outdated, simply game art gallery books, or written by guys who aren't much further into their career than the reader. Omernick clearly knows what he is talking about. This is not a tutorial book as it isn't really application specific though he does show where most of the features are located in Maya and 3ds Max. If you want to learn a software package, there are plenty of good books for that. This book gives you a focus for game art, if that is what you want to do. There is also a lot on next gen features that are important. After reading this book, I new pretty much what I was going to need in my portfolio, and as I played video games after reading it, I really had a good understanding of almost everything I saw. This book is a MUST HAVE for anyone interested in a game art career.

Link