Torque 3D Book idea?

#1 Yes, good idea, I could bring some things about the art pipeline, but there is still much experimentation about it.

#2 Well we already got the Cookbook and a couple of other books.
If you are thinking of a free book you could use Torque3d.net's book section.

#3 I think a valuable section would be on: "How to create and package art assets for the T3D engine." There seems to be a lot of artists doing artwork for Unity and advertising here. So either they are too lazy to adjust their offerings and test with T3D, the market size of T3D is too small to justify a product just for T3D, or they simply don't know how.

There are a lot of talented artists at T3D that do textures, terrain, models, GUIs, etc. It would be cool to have some more comprehensive guides for creating that artwork. In a book it could be compiled into one location.

#4 The thing is T3D in its current state is not reflecting what the rest would call a valuable choice - this has to change and the change is in process.

One of the goals of project Greed is to add Art assets with source files
so that users can easily extend/ build upon
those.

Now imagine the art part of the book as a guideline on how to take your model/ playermodel/ weapon model
into Blender and how to rig it to the rig of greed along with sample files to ease the pain.

So much to the art pipeline, however this whole thing - believe it or not is only working with the community as a unit, working together for the cause.

#5 There is some problems with the art pipeline at the moment, for example see my latest post about terrain material normals problem, so for this part there is at the moment no right way how to make it and there are also some other things, that do not have a real standard yet, you have to try out and see how it works in the engine. A simple format conversion will not make it Torque 3D ready.

#6 well what i really want from this book is to not just scratch the surface of what torque is capable of but more along the lines of getting your hands dirty and doing things in source code hence the section on modifying source code, while i do like the other books out there about torque 3d i feel they never really go near the source code of torque they usually stick to scripting, and on that note they also tend to stay away from shaders too. The main focus is to show people that yes torque might not have that many ready made features but roll ur sleeves up and u can easily make them yourself. Engine source code for torque isnt well documented as u all know but show someone how to do something simple in torque 3ds source code such as creating new classes and exposing them to script, the enums torque uses for directx functions(this would open up alot of the engine actually), what is the best way to get models and textures from gimp and blender into torque, best way to create a level, how to create a new shader and explaining how torque uses basic hlsl language and how to use its postfx functions without having to change the source code for each of ur individual shaders

#7

Quote:to do something simple in torque 3ds source code such as creating new classes and exposing them to script, the enums torque uses for directx functions....
...having to change the source code for each of ur individual shaders

This is so true and the shader stuff was never really documented
and even in dave Wyands Book - it was just a scratch the surface thing.

Well i hope to see some more input here.

#8 I would like such a book :)