Creating Games with Unreal Engine Substance Painter & Maya

was really looking forward to reading this book and its a big disappointment book looks second hand bent and scratched and printing quality is really bad for a book this price there might as well be no pictures others seem to have a colour pictures also i don't!

I’ve read probably hundreds of game development books, and this one, I can say, is the best. Bar none. The authors are clear, and explain their steps as well as the reasoning behind it. They display keen knowledge of the subject matter, the topics are explored in every detail, and the final product is actually a quite impressive little demo. I will delve deeper into why I liked this book so much, but I will say now that this probably the ultimate source material for anyone wanting to embark on a journey as a solo developer and should not be missed.The game you create in the book is pretty fully featured compared to what you typically see in other books or tutorials. You have a human character that is modeled, rigged, animated, and textured from scratch. Hard surface models for the level and props like guns. Enemy AI including sight detection, chasing, shooting. Handling health and a HUD. Coding different guns, switching weapons. Start, pause, and game over screens. A boss fight, special effects, and more. This book is extremely comprehensive.Also, the art actually looks good and the coding is done to proper standards. I see way too many tutorials and books that have the reader create a huge text file with an entire game, or use global variables everywhere, while saying “this is not the right way to code a game, but I’m keeping it simple for example”. Well the problem here is that beginners are learning the *wrong* way to do things in an effort to dumb down the material. Yes it makes the initial learning curve easier, but it gets you into bad habits and leaves budding developers in a bad position when they need to learn good coding standards and practices. The authors of this book have went out of their way to code in an object oriented style, using classes, inheritance, interfaces, and also following good coding practice in variable and function naming. So yes, some parts of the book can be confusing because of this, but if you study each part it will make sense in time and I think the investment pays off because you can see how real code should actually look. Similarly, the art is using proper topology and modeling methods, and I actually learned a few key tricks even though I’ve worked with Maya off and on for years. I will say that there is a *ton* of material here, and it is a lot to take in, but, again, the payoff is there.Unlike most other books, that focus on a particular framework or engine, here in Creating Games with Unreal Engine, Substance Painter, & Maya we see the full stack for developing a high quality game. These are industry standard tools, and while the licenses can be costly, these are the programs real AAA developers are using for their games. If you are looking to get a job in the industry, or simply want to make an indie game look AAA, then I’d say the best path is using the same tools as the pros and build your skills there. Here we see how to do hard surface and character modeling in Maya, creating textures in Substance Painter, rigging and animation also in Maya, and bringing that all in for a game demo in Unreal. While there are other tools that could have been used, for example Substance Designer and ZBrush are not covered, I find that the choice was a good one to build a solid foundation for designing a whole game, including the art and programming.So overall I could not be more happy with the purchase of this book. Kassandra Arevalo, Matthew Tovar, and Jingtian Li have created one of the best game development books of all time. At over 800 pages, and with the level of topics covered, it’s not an easy book to read but I would say more than worthwhile. If you are balking at the price, don’t be. It was worth every penny.That all said, be sure you are prepared to read this. While the book doesn’t assume any prior knowledge, and does try to explain all the steps from the top, it still is a fairly advanced text. If you just want to dip your toes into Unreal Engine, there are certainly easier books to get started with, but they are nowhere near as comprehensive. And while there are a few large books on Maya, that do go into further detail, they are rarely geared toward gaming, so may not be the best in terms of integrating with Unreal or other real-time engines. Substance Painter is a newer application, and there are not as many (or any really) books to find, so we are good there. So I would not shy away from this book at any experience level. There is something for everyone here, but effort is required to understand everything. Even though I have been developing games for over 20 years (both as a hobby and professionally) I have learned some valuable lessons here and I would highly recommend this book, especially to those who want to try the solo developer journey. You will not be disappointed.

This is an early review as I'm only about 70 pages in but there are 2 pages that printed poorly. One of the pages has two pages printed on it and one of them is flipped and words are blended together and some are just cut off. This continues onto the next page where most of the words are cut off, it's only 2 pages so far and continues as normal after. Honestly I just hope this is just one printing error and there aren't any more pages with cut off information.Another reviewer mentioned needing a magnifying glass for these images and I'd have to agree. Maybe you guys can bundle a magnifying glass with every book purchase? Haha but honestly these issues aren't the authors fault but it does reduce the quality of your book and you should get your money back from the printing company.Oh I should also mention that there are some grammatical errors in the beginning of the book. It's not a huge deal as you can understand what the author is conveying but I know some people are very specific with their grammar so I figured I'd mention it.To be fair these are mostly cosmetic complaints. As far as information goes, its not bad so far but I'm only in the first section and it's about maya, I'm not particularly interested in this section as I use blender and I'm mainly reading the maya section for any tips and tricks of the industry regarding 3d modeling and their pipeline. I'll give a proper review once I'm further into the meat and potatoes of the book which is unreal engine and substance painter. I was gonna buy a magnifying glass for the book but I might just zoom in with my phone to see the images better. It is what it is.

Bought the paperback product. Some of the pictures, especially those for the Unreal parts, are really small. Buy a magnifying glass if you don't have perfect vision.

The book offers a lot of info on a lot of different subjects, but you are going to need prior knowledge of Maya and Substance Painter to be able to fully understand the new information. The physical book is printed with imagery that is too small to make out what it is you are looking at with a lot of wasted space on each page. On top of that, as mentioned by another reviewer, the book references source materials that are nowhere to be found. I dug through the book thinking that I had missed something and eventually contacted the publisher. Their customer service rep stated that there wasn’t any source material, even after providing an image to the page from the book that specifically mentioned the downloadable source material.