game development pro
Jeremy Birn’s Digital Lighting and Rendering is a masterful treatise on digital lighting and, in my opinion, a must have on your bookshelf if you’re a 3d artist. While the text is clearly aimed at pre-rendered art, for example in animated movies or live-action effects, most of the concepts are fundamental enough to apply to lighting real-time scenes in games, or even more traditional art
Although the Vulkan API has been available for about a year now, it was just at the tail end of 2016 that we started to see books published on the topic. For me personally, I prefer learning from books over just reading documentation, and Vulkan Programming Guide is a fine effort. At 480 pages, it is a comfortable length, and manages to hit on
Learning Vulkan by Parminder Singh is an excellent foray into the Vulkan graphics API and quite a competent book. The text is a reasonable 466 pages, and packs a lot in there. Singh covers all the basics of using Vulkan and goes into great detail at each step of the way. Not only is there actual C++ code shown (a lot of it), but he
Vulkan Graphics API: in 20 Minutes is a short, no-nonsense, introduction to the Vulkan graphics API. Though the title of the book says “20 minutes,” I believe I spent somewhere between 1 and 2 hours to finish it (though I admittedly read pretty slow). This is the type of book I wish there were more of: something short and sweet as a brief
Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications by James M. Van Verth and Lars M. Bishop is a quality math book if I ever saw one. Strangely, the first edition came out in 2004 but the book was kind of off my radar until recently. This third edition was published in 2015 and seems very current. The authors here do a great job
Game Programming Algorithms and Techniques is one of those books that tries to be as general as possible, and I believe the author was successful in that. Too many books target one specific piece of software or even one particular version of a framework and end up becoming dated rather quick. However, the core ideas in game development have not fundamentally changed in
Right here is a book with a clearly defined goal and an excellent execution. Learning C++ by Creating Games with UE4 by William Sherif takes you on a journey from being a total blank in C++ to coding some basic features of a 3D game. Even though I have been coding in C++ for years, I still enjoy reading novice level texts as sometimes
In this tutorial, I will show how to make a cube roll from side-to-side on a grid. This project took me around 3 days to complete, though much of that was wrapping my head around basic things in UE4. Some of the areas explored here include setting up key bindings and action mapping, setting and clearing timers, and rotating around an arbitrary point.
This is a book with a solid focus, and I feel like it accomplishes it’s goal nicely. Basically what Maya Studio Projects is about is creating environment objects and props for games (as the title implies). There are 9 chapters, and each one chooses a different object to model. McKinley is very detailed in his explanation, and really shows each and every step needed to follow
Today I will show how to create a textured spinning cube using Unreal Engine 4. Making a cube spin is basically what I consider the “litmus test” of 3D engines. How long it takes you to figure this out will show how convenient or capable the engine is. While I might have skipped this test (by jumping straight into creating Pong) I thought it was worthwhile
