Hiya there, I'm foremost a programmer, but lately I've been interested in the 2D and 3D art that is used in games. I'm familiar with the code side of 3D programming, but creating the art has always seemed like a mystical black-art to me. I mean, I've played around with making 3D crates and 'eggplants' (don't ask), but modelling a human character or creating a seamless texture for a brick wall or something like that - I just wouldn't even know where to start. Basically, I'm wondering if anyone can recommend any books or other resources that would give me some idea of how it's done - I'd like to understand the process a bit more, plus it would be really useful for some small personal projects I'm working on. I have a copy of Caligari GameSpace (1.6?) lying around somewhere, will that be OK for 3D? I've not really used it myself. Thanks for any replies :)

The latest version of Blender has a really cool Sculpt mode. You might want to check it out:

http://www.blender3d.org

I started with a box and found it really easy to make faces with it, and I'm also primarily a programmer.

If you're interested in 2D art, for tools I would recommend Paint Shop Pro or Cosmigo ProMotion (or both).

I'll let someone who's more artistic point you to good tutorials on actually creating art.

Well I recommend www.wings3d.com to get started with modelling. Its free and very simple and just focuses on modelling, no extra fluff, so its great to start learning with, as well as having things in common with leading 3D software packages like 3DS and Maya (as opposed to the esoteric interface of Blender).

But yeah, making good "artwork" is as large as life itself.

Here's one of the most popular 3D modelling tutorials online.
http://67.15.36.49/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.asp
It teaches you techniques for creating human shapes.

Getting the eye of an artist just requires practice and constantly looking at what makes your work different from reality or someone elses artwork you think looks a lot better. So practice copying things - one good way is to find a picture of some character done in a certain style, and make your own character in that style, as if it belonged in that video game / cartoon, etc.

I am primarily a coder but being very self reliant, I have learned some of the basic tricks for 2d/3d. Here is a pretty good tutorial on seamless texture making:

http://www.highpoly3d.com/writer/tutorials/tileable/seamless.htm

The only other advice I can impart on you is to practice. Hopefully some of the (much) more skilled artists around here can link you up with more stuff. ;) gl

edit: Also, I learned the basic concepts of 3d modeling with anim8or, which is extremely simple, though it tends to put out somewhat sloppy models in my experience due to a lack of very exact modifying. Once I was over the basics, I switched to blender. Blender's interface is a beast to be tackled, but with the help of this tutorial, I managed it and now use blender comfortably.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro