3D Game Textures, Second Edition: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop ebook

I have been scouring the Internet for texturing tutorials for over a year, now, after reading this awesome book, I think I just saved myself hours and hours of wasted time looking for tips and tricks.
It answered many questions I had, as well as revealing basic fundamentals that I had missed before, which was why I was struggling. Already my texturing has advanced 200% in 1 week!
I am actually using GIMP Paint-studio 2.8, which I know quite well, so that also is a good recommendation that I can use different software and get the same or similar result.
Truly, this is where you should start if you want to learn texture creation for games!
(Although I should point out if you use Gimp or other software than Photoshop, the filters are not named exactly the same, but all the techniques are gone over pretty extensively, so you can figure out how to do it, and you will need to develop your own technique to get the same end result. But it is a good way to learn Texturing.)

An ok book for an absolute clueless beginner, but limited real value to anyone whos been in the industry on the artistic side for a while, which is disappointing because it came highly recommended. Some of the techniques are outdated, and only suited to low-fi non-HD graphics, defiantly not suited for next gen development. Its decent at what it does though, so if your clueless about graphics for games, or want to learn some nifty photoshop techniques that you can probably find on youtube for free anyway, go ahead and grab it for the bookshelf!

Pros
-Has good introduction to the fundamentals of texture creation.
-Introduces numerous techniques to use Photoshop tools and filters in useful and sometimes unconventional ways

Cons
-Does not specify which version of Photoshop (Definitely CS4 or older, but not sure)
-Tutorials are poorly written/edited:
>Following the directions as-written will NOT result in textures that match the example pictures
>Frequently uses vague or confusing language
>Rarely explains reasoning for performing a step

Bought this for a class I was teaching. While it was okay for the information it provided there needed to be more examples and exercises demonstrating the techniques they were teaching.

There's a lot to like about a book like this for the beginning texture artist, such as myself. It gives you the fundamentals of how to recreate a texture from the ground up without actually having to paint hardly anything! Just use what Photoshop has to offer and you can follow this book all the way through.
That would be the downside though, must have Photoshop! If you don't then I wouldn't see you getting much out of this book except the techniques, which may or may not be done in another paint program.
This is just a beginner's book because it doesn't cover anything about skin or human painting and texturing, which is what I'm now looking for in another book. This just covers inanimate objects, but it just blows my mind how easy it now is using his techniques. I'm no longer intimidated by a blank white screen with no textures, and am now cranking stuff out a lot better looking (not professional yet, but getting there).
Deffinantly worth getting for beginners or people apprehensive towards texturing.

(This review is for the 1st edition only, however I can't imagine the 2nd edition being improved enough to make this at all recommendable)

As others have already stated, this book starts out with some relatively decent advice on texture gathering from photos, explaining Photoshop layer modes (which I did find particularly useful), and some game-engine related information on how textures work, however any useful information in this book stops as soon as you get to the actual texture creation tutorials, which is the whole point people purchased this book.

I bought this book in the hopes that I'd glean some new techniques or workflows to improve my skills. I should have thumbed through it at a book store first. A few other reviewers have experienced the same situation I did when I first went through this book: none of the textures come out the same as the author's end result (because the author clearly doesn't follow his own steps exactly to get these results). I'm a current game artist and seasoned user of Photoshop as well. I even reset to default settings and removed user profiles to be sure I was starting from a blank slate to try to get these right. Didn't help one bit. It's mind-boggling. Not only do none of the tutorials produce accurate results (compare your results with the same completed images on the companion cd...you'll be quite surprised), but most disturbing of all is every single texture is made solely via Photoshop filters. That's it. Filters.

This is NOT how current modern game textures are created. These may be semi-useful for low-poly, mobile/hand-held 3D games, but for todays nex-gen games? Not at all. The average nex-gen game asset today starts with building a high-poly model, then LOD'ing it (making a low-poly version, that is), unwrapping your low-poly model for a good UV layout, then creating the AO and normal map (using the 3D package or a program like xNormal), then creating a diffuse map (with AO, or Ambient Occlusion, applied) in Photoshop, and from there other necessary maps (like reflection, glossy, specular, etc.) are created. And these are often hand-painted or heavily photo-manipulated as well, or a mix of both. You'll barely see any filters used, but rather tonal and color adjustments. Using filters to put in shadows is not a common technique at all either, like we see in most of the tutorials in this book, but rather is handled via game engine light baking, and AO maps help that illusion as well. Even some current work I'm doing involving low-poly assets uses unwrapping and AO baking for the models, and it's a web-based game!

These techniques may have been useful years ago before modern technologies, but they're no longer valid unless a game specifically calls for this style of texturing (which is probably pretty rare by now anyway) or for mobile or hand-held games. To be fair, each game and studio uses different techniques and styles, depending on the game. Having worked on or seen the techniques used for some of today's most popular games, like Dragon Age for instance, I can safely say that you should avoid this book at all costs if you wish to do texturing of that caliber. This book won't teach you that. And learning to do textures via a mass of filters is also something you should avoid as well.

I understand you can't write a book teaching people how to be artists or how to use the tools available to them to produce the best results they can via lots of specific, personal techniques, but using loads of filters? This is just teaching someone how to become dependent on using filters to create convincing textures, which they are anything but in the end. It makes you look like a hack, not an artist. The best resources to learn texturing today can be found by simply searching the net (like on game-artist.net or cg.tutsplus.com for instance) or by using training DVD's through the excellent Gnomon Workshop or Eat3D. Even those may not teach you everything, but they'll get you on the right track, instead of derail you like this book will.