Customer Rating:  
Summary: Uninspiring.
Comment: I purchased this book to continue to develop my digital art abilities, but was completely disappointed. While it would work fine as a teaching tool for someone who had never tried to use Photoshop for texturing, as an intermediately skilled texture artist, the book offered nothing in the way of new material.
One of the things I found most frustrating was the very poor art used in examples. The textures he uses look incredibly flat with bad color balance through-out the scene and far too much frustrating repetition. It looks as though he may have spent 20 minutes per texture. The exception to this rule is the texture at the end of the book which is interesting, but don't spend your money for a single good tutorial.
I would have really appreciated some texture painting tips and techniques, but he doesn't really touch on them. He doesn't really mention how light plays with different objects (specularity etc.), which is completely essential to creating believable textures.
On the plus side, if you've never made a texture in your life, the book will certainly give you a base to start from, and introduce some of the most basic concepts you will need to know. But anyone else (and including the above mentioned nOObs), don't waste your money. There are far better tutorials to be found on the internet, and they are in an abundance.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Comedy gold
Comment: David Franson does a fantastic job of showing aspiring texture artists how to strive for ever greater levels of mediocrity in this book, which amounts to little more than a printed compilation of the basic free tutorials you could find in 20 minutes of Google searching.
The example textures Franson walks you through are pretty basic and lame, and the included images on the CD are hilarious by themselves. For example, a lot of them have a major case of flash burn or other serious irregularities that make them very bad source material for your own textures-no amount of cloning or doctoring can salvage a nicely tiling texture out of many of the images on the CD. You're better off building your own collection of source and reference images by searching for "Mayang" and "CGTexture" on Google.
However, it is not without redeeming value-it's a great comedic read if you're a more experienced texture artist than the author. That bar, if this book is anything to go by, is pretty low.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great place to start for learning the basics of game texture creation
Comment: I'm currently in the process of learning game art and its limitations in my off time so I can, someday, break into the game industry. This book is right up my alley because I'd like to be an environment/asset artist and this book covers texturing of several typical environments you'll find in today's games and some texturing of some basic assets you'd find in those particular settings.
Personally speaking, I learned a lot from this book and the techniques made sense to me, a fairly seasoned photoshop user, and I was able to re-create the authors textures picture-perfect (which do not look ugly, as another reviewer claims his were...sucks for you, pal). That, to me, is the biggest plus of this book. The instructions were clear and concise enough that I was able to follow them easily and come out with textures that were accurate to the examples in the book. Kudos to David's hard work to make that a reality for the people who use this book as their starting point to learn game texturing. It's a good mix of pictures to compare along the way and written instruction, but you're not overly burdened by reading and then doing. David does a good job of explaining to you why you are doing what you're doing instead of listing every step to get the texture to look as the example does. Understanding why you do what you do is priceless.
I'm currently in the middle of Luke Ahearn's "3D game textures" book and I can't, for the life of me, figure out some of the instructions in the book and the outcome I'm seeing not matching the examples...to me, that is frustrating as all get out and it's unfortunate as it's a newer book that supposedly has more current techniques used by today's game artists. I've yet to finish the book, so I can only hope those issues are cleared up later in the book. This alone makes the book much less appealing than The Dark Side of Game Texturing already. One other things is that, gasp, the techniques in this book and Luke's (which seems to be getting nothing but 5-star ratings...) are very similar minus a few slight differences. Interesting.
Overall, I'd say the techniques in this book are far from dated, but are integral for laying the groundwork to learning game texturing. People forget that not all developers out there have access to the latest generation hardware and utilize these 'old' techniques all the time and rely heavily on them to create their games so they look and play beautifully. Just as a fine artist must never forget the basics when creating beautiful masterpieces, digital artists must also have a solid understanding of the basics in the digital realm, and also of fine art. You may be able to create anything digitally these days, but only an artist who understands what makes art great will be able to stand out from the rest of the wannabe game artists out there.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not bad for an old book written by a non-artist
Comment: I am a traditional artist with some photoshop skills. I am new to texturing however and this book is a nice beginners book. The techniques he shows are helpful if you are a texturing n00b like me.
However the results he provides are so ugly that it is hard to be inspired by his efforts. OTOH it doesn't take much to create better looking textures than he does if you have any artistic training at all and use his techniques.
When I say his results are ugly I don't mean that they look tattered and decayed - hey that's the whole point of the book. I mean they are poorly composed and executed.
So while I am glad I bought the book I wouldn't pay more than $5.00 for it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very dated techniques
Comment: These approached for things are unfortunately a bit dated and I felt reading through the text that things were going to be a bit cookie cutter. With new practices such as normal mapping, specularity mapping and such, this book covers the most basic of steps in texturing without going into much theory about how to create procedural textures to a great degree of detail.
I would recommend getting Digital Texturing and Painting by Owen Demers as your primer to interpret what you see in the real world and my school teaches and recommends 3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop. The work I have seen the students in the game texturing class at my school is very impressive and it looks a much higher caliber of work than what could be done learning from this Dark Side book.
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