Love 3D art and graphics? Want to work with CG special effects? Or maybe you want to animate. Get started with 3D Art Essentials, the only book that explains 3D graphics without being attached to any single 3D application. In fact, you may want to read it before you choose an application, as you'll get a good idea of how YOU like to work.

Learn the ins and outs of modeling, how to add texture and color to your models, and the basics of 3D animation. You'll also get a primer on how to get started in 3D computer graphics or special effects as a career.

Ami Chopine is the co-founder of Geekatplay Studio, which has released several award-winning images and animations, and is well known for its informative and easy-to-follow tutorials. Ami is also the author of several tutorials for magazines, as well as the 2009 book Vue 7: From the Ground Up. She is a graduate of Orson Scott Card's Literary Bootcamp and has a passion for teaching and helping other artists develop their creativity.

3d Art Essentials was written to give beginning 3D artists a map through both the art and how to get involved in the 3D industry. You can use it by reading all the way through it cover to cover with or without doing the tutorials, by picking and choosing chapters based on gaps you want to fill, or as a quick reference to a concept you remembered last week but not this minute.

If you are at all familiar with tutorials for 3D or other types of art or activies, you'll know that they often give very detailed, step by step instructions on which exact thing to click or select. This is not possible with 3D Art Essentials because it is software agnostic. The best way to go through these tutorials is to have the application's documentation next to you to help you complete each step. The tutorials are designed to give you some practice with important concepts. If you can finish every tutorial in this book, you're well on your way to enjoying the art and creating whatever is in your imagination.

As well as learning from 3D Art Essentials itself, use it as a guide for studying each topic more in depth. Go through each chapter and then spend a couple of weeks on the topic which that chapter covers, to learn and practice the concepts more in depth. You will probably find some topics more interesting than others. That's okay. The field is too wide for there not to be specialists.

With just a few weeks of study, you can already be creating interesting models. With a few years of experience, you can animate characters or creatures that are nearly indistinguishable from life.

No matter your age or background, and no matter your goals, the art is in you.

Enjoy.