Great tutorials, but a little more context would be even better.

Hi Edgelooper!

Sorry for the confusion. I hope this can clear things up.

Materials DVD:
The materials are indeed very effective in an actual environment and especially the environment you describe. The only exception would be the brick but even in controlled cases this can and has been used in production.
What I say in the intro is that the test environment itself isnt representative of an actual environment. Its just some sloppy BSP thrown together. This was before I had rights to use the Unreal levels and hopefully newer DVDs will be using their environments or modified versions.

Texturing DVD:
Indeed the meshses themselves are not for a typical game, but thats ok because its not a mesh creation DVD. This dvd is just about texturing and the textures themselves are exactly how Ive done it in many game productions.

Pillar DVD:
I threw this one in here because it claims to teach how to not only texture, but model and UV and all those things.

So in summary, in what the DVD covers and claims to teach, these techniques and demonstrations are very relevant to real first and 3rd person next-gen games.

Im surprised to hear many times that people say the texturing mesh isn't meant for a game and that somehow discredits the video. When the video itself never claims this, it claims to show how to texture, and so on.

Hopefully this clears up the confusion, please let me know if you need me to elaborate on anything. As always, thanks for the purchase and support. Any suggestions or comments you make on our products will be taken seriously.

Thanks for the compliments!

What our intention are with these DVDs is to give a good solid base for the types of games we all have worked on.

Unfortunately every single game will have specs so different that its really crazy. Not only that, it gets worse. Even levels within the game will have custom limitations and problems. This really is something the team hammers on until the bloody end when the game ships. Depending on how well the pipeline is established and how well the designers will prepare what each section will be without changing it much, will yield a much higher end result.

So if a designer says this area will have 20 AIs attacking you, so in this case everything on the env side needs to be as cheap as possible. However if the section will be some drama empty space that leads up to another place where the action will be, well in this case the artists can have more room to add higher quality meshes (hero pieces) and so on.

There are some companies that have their pipeline down so well that alot of stuff can be confidently defined in the early stages. Im sure its like this at Epic and have no reason to think it isnt. Im sure those guys can tell you exactly how to do it. The problem would be thats how to do it if you work there, hahaha. Take that info to another studio and alot of it will fall apart.

Dont get me started with PS3/360 and other platform limitations. It really can be a nightmare and the last few games I worked on had to be shipped on all platforms. What this means is you have to take the lowest common denominator of all of them at that time.

The key is to know a good foundation and prepare to fluctuate from there from place to place.

Having said all that there is another aspect to consider. If you are simply doing this stuff from your portfolio, its helps to keep around sane limitations but it helps even more to have good looking stuff in your port. You can make excuses all day why something doesn't look good because of a limitation but in the end your portfolio will be the most important when trying to find a job. Even professionals when they do stuff at home will typically go a little beyond their current in-game limitations to make it look just a little better for the portfolio.

I hope this helps!