Texturing & Modeling: A Procedural Approach, Third Edition

Rating:
Summary: A must for serious graphics developer and researcher
Review: I found this book in a rack in a local book shop where they had kept books about Photoshop and Illustrator. I asked the book seller, he said it's about making nice images so it is there. Any way absolutely must book for serious graphics researcher. I got introduced to genetic textures, I was unaware of them.

The book does not cover reaction diffusion textures.

Rating:
Summary: well worth its cost
Review: The only reason I am writing this review, is because of all the negative reviews previously posted.

I really find it irrational to complain for the content of the book claiming that it is poor or incomplete, just because it does not cover everything about the subject. This is a broad field and many topics might be too advanced ot too specific to be covered, it does provide however a lot of references for anyone interested in further reading. I strongly believe that this book is a lot more than an introductory, with straighforward explanations to several advanced topics and many well documented examples. I also like the "wordy" approach that some of the authors use for advanced topics, which makes the text a lot more comprehensible regardless of the reader being mathematically inclined or not.

And I also have to mention that all previous posts refer to earlier editions, so many information are not valid anymore (e.g. there is a thorough desctiption of Worley's cellular texturing in the third edition).

Concerning all this moaning for the high price, I think it's totally unfair, as besides anything else it is of exceptional print quality (great paper, full color, etc). I personally consider this book one of the most valuable that I have ever had, so it wouldn't matter to me even if it was a lot more expensive.

Rating:
Summary: Academia is a poor basis for practical exposition
Review: This book has several serious problems.

The most glaring is that a significant number of the examples are coded in the "Renderman shading language". This language serves, in this book, to hide detail, detail specifically related to producing textures. Of course, if you know the language, you're fine - but most won't know the language and so this is a grievous error.

By way of welcome contrast, other examples in this same book are instead presented as C code fragments or functions. That's just the ticket - using a broadly known, freely available, relatively low-level language with no recourse to unknown hidden graphics functionality is precisely the way to go when explaining ideas in the domain of those this book is intended to convey.

The second problem is one of content. While being concise to the level of a math text is not desirable, this book contains a very sparse field of useful information considering the number of pages. The margins are too wide, the text too large, the form factor of the book too small, and the authors too wordy to possibly convey a good basis for texturing in general - it is a broad and fascinating field, touched only in the briefest and most unsatisfying manner by this book.

I do take issue with the reviewer who complained about the exposition on how to make a brick texture; that area of the text, while it may be already quite familiar to many who are interested in texturing, contains precisely the level of detail that needs to pervade a book of this type, and detail about steps that underly critical basic texturing ideas. Without understanding those basic texturing tools, a novice misses the first step on the stairs and fall on their face. The problem is, this approach is not consistent for more complex ideas in this volume, few as those actually are.

The book is entitled "Texturing and Modeling". While there is a moderate amount of texturing information in it, whatever you do, don't get it if modeling is your goal. It is very nearly devoid of modeling information, and what there is (smoke, a planet simulation, a few other items) is very basic indeed.

Finally, as a general critique, the authors (all of them) need to learn the basic idea that when presenting a function in any language to a new audience, one should precisely define the domain (and rationale) of the inputs and outputs of the function. As an example, one might encode the function for Perlin noise, and have no idea whatsoever as to what values to feed it to get particular types of results. For those of us who can read and understand what the function is actually doing (which is esoteric, make no mistake about it) the answers will eventually be illuminated by careful study of the function. However, this is very advanced material, and I am absolutely certain that many readers will be unable to figure out how to effectively use this function without a great deal of trial and error. You can also read that as "wasting a great deal of their time." That is because they won't be learning anything that could not have been conveyed by the author(s) in a single short paragraph of domain information.

In summary:

The 2 stars is because I didn't think this was a very good book. On the other hand, it is one of the very few books that deals with the subject at all, and for that reason, you should definitely own it if textures are an interest of yours.

If you're newly interested in textures, this will give you a basis for further exploration. It won't give you a cookbook by any means.

If you're looking for cookbook and "how to" approaches, get on the web and the newsgroups.

Finally, if you're considering writing a good book about creating textures, by all means, please do. The world needs a good one: this most definitely isn't it. I'd be delighted to be one of the first owners of your new book.

Rating:
Summary: Extremely useful and interesting, but not technical enough
Review: This is an update of a classic book on procedural texturing and modeling by the main founders of the field. The book presents lengthy discussions of classical procedural texturing using various noise functions of the sort originated by Ken Perlin (one of the authors). It discusses newer texturing techniques such as cellular texturing, which can be used, for example, to create convincing stone patterns. Other chapters focus on animating solid textures (e.g. marble forming, volumetric gasses, etc.), fractal terrain generation, and tips for utilizing existing graphics APIs and hardware for realtime procedural texturing. This is only a sampling of the topics covered.

Code samples in C and RenderMan are given throughout, although most algorithms are given in only one of those languages. This can be a bit of a problem, as many readers will probably not have access to a RenderMan implementation. Nevertheless, it is not too difficult to translate the RenderMan code into C code in many instances.

The biggest drawback to this book is its lack of rigorous technical coverage. The decision to omit many mathematical details was a conscious choice on the part of the authors. Instead the book is mostly prose discussion of the techniques and the coarse descriptions of the underlying concepts. Although the prose is mostly clear, many times I felt myself in need of more specific, technical details. Fortunately, the book's authors are the primary researchers in this field and most of the ideas in the book have been published in academic journals. It was very easy to supplement the book with these primary sources.

Overall I found this to be a very interesting and useful book, with many algorithms essentially ready-to-run right out of the book. It would get five stars, except for the lack of technical and mathematical details mentioned above. Every serious worker in graphics needs to have this book on their shelf. I use mine often.