Eat3d are a relatively new company that offers training videos on a range of CG topics. In this DVD, Riki Babington shares his workflow in texturing a scene in Photoshop and importing into Unreal Editor 3. We took at walk through the training to see what we thought.
Initial impressions
The training comes as almost five hours of video training in Adobe Flash Player and has a nice friendly interface with all the options and controls you'd expect. It additionally comes with all the 3ds Max, Photoshop and Unreal files used in the training which allows you to investigate in more detail the finished product, as well as follow the training as Riki chats through it. An additional great benefit is the library of Photoshop brushes that have been included. These, as Riki demonstrates, play a massive part in producing professional textures - so it's very useful that these have been included.
Taking the information from the website, the training covers:
- Going over the Photoshop UI, Masks, Layer Blends, and Adjustment Layers
- Briefly Describing the Wacom Tablet and Common Brush Settings
- Going through the Custom Brushes (Over 80 Brushes Provided with the DVD)
- Demonstrating How to Quickly and Effectively Create Tileable Textures
- Demonstrating the Importance of "Leveling" Your Textures for a Lit Environment
- Explaining the Importance of Setting Correct Smoothing Groups when Generating Normal Maps
- Previewing your Combined Textures inside Unreal Editor 3
- Combining the Rendered Textures for a Quick Base for Previewing
- Creating 7 different Spec Maps, Diffuse Maps, and Normal Maps
Impossible tasks
One of the problems I've often found with training DVDs is that they struggle to balance sharing the technical expertise they have (or at least should do!) and conveying this in a simple manner. One option is to fly along at a good pace and lose half your audience, the other is to take your time and probably bore most of them. Riki deserves a lot of credit for managing this and juggles the process, the reasoning behind what he's doing and the various shortcuts and tips very well. He's packed the video with plenty of good advice and makes a point of visually demonstrating the differences - for example flicking back and forth between before adjusting levels in Photoshop and after. This reinforces the point and helps to embed the learning much better.
I felt at all times he was keeping a good pace on the lesson, whilst retaining the 'true' process - that is all the little period of tweaking and testing that goes on in real production environments.
What can you learn
Riki clearly has a wealth of knowledge and really focuses on demonstrating the texturing process in Photoshop. In terms of the level of knowledge required, whilst we're very comfortable producing textures ourselves in Photoshop, I didn't feel the tutorial was inaccessible in any way. He goes through the whole of his Photoshop process in detail, down to his preference for workspace layout in Photoshop, as well as the type of graphics tablet he's using. He goes through all the very basic usage of a pressure-sensitive tablet in Photoshop and how to manipulate the various brush settings. So I'm confident this'd be a really nice introduction to game texturing for a beginner - he's also careful to avoid one of my pet hates in online training; where they start using shortcut keys and don't tell you what they're pressing! In most cases in fact, Riki took time to show the UI commands for the functions and just mentioned the shortcut alternative as required. His Photoshop techniques are very robust and he observes a rigidly non-destructive workflow which many other tutorials miss (another pet gripe!), so I'd not hesitate to recommend him as a good benchmark for beginners learning optimal working patterns for the first time.
At the other end of the scale I think the training contains a lot of insight and workflow styling that should be useful to even advanced users. Particularly with a monster of a program like Photoshop, there's always at least a dozen ways of achieving the same result and much of the professional learning process is about 'fine tuning' your workflow to be as time efficient as possible. He shares a lot of perspectives on techniques and styles that are more preferences based on experience, rather than particularly 'how tos', so for the more advanced user it'll maintain your interest in hearing from an industry professional on how they work and the reasons/experiences behind these.
Downsides?
I have to say I was highly impressed by the video. I'd certainly consider their quality to be industry-leading on this basis. Technically, I think Riki demonstrates his undoubted ability in Photoshop. There were a couple of little 'optimal' routes I'd have taken - for example, a few times he goes through the process of selecting the visible layer, copying it, pasting to a new layer and then deleting the underlying layer. I would personally just select and crop to achieve the same result (that being the removal of the extraneous non-visible image data). Also there are a couple of tricks when blending layers (eg using alt + click the bars to create a soft blend), but these are very much just tweaks in the process as I mentioned earlier and very minor niggles.
I'm also conscious that the video was taking a little 'creative license' with the scene he's creating. In most production flows you'd probably be a bit more focused on creating reusable assets and tiling textures, rather than very specific, unique resources - especially for a fairly unimportant-seeming object like this. I think this is forgiveable as it permits the training to cover a much wider breadth of topics that would otherwise be possible and also draws the focus onto the texturing and the creative side of designing texturing, rather than all the limitations and restrictions of a game company environment.
Conclusions
Well clearly if you're involved in next-gen games, then you're barking mad if you don't buy it. I'd strongly recommend to everyone from beginners to pro in this part of the CG community - even if your speciality is modelling/animation/etc it's really an essential purchase to expand and reinforce your skillset. But I'd actually widen the area of interest more broadly. The topics covered like blending textures, painting seams and building multi-layered maps are industry-generic and should be of value to anyone involved in 3D texturing.
We've no hesitation in giving this training a big thumbs up and suggest you put it on your wishlist immediately.
We'll be reviewing other tutorials from Eat3d in the coming weeks, Riki's set a high watermark with this - we'll look forward to seeing if they can keep it up!
Find out more at Eat3d.com
