Sketchbook: Justin Meisse

[Justin Meisse]

Update: this thread will be my UT3 level progress thread
crits and suggestions appreciated


err, I posted and it disappeared into the aether, try again

some quickness
http://artbyjustin.com/images/draw/zombojones.jpg

domwar entry I'll never finish (or start) felt sad it to see it vanish
http://artbyjustin.com/domwar3/domwarhead01.jpg

why so small
http://artbyjustin.com/images/zomzom01.jpg

holy crap, I see a disturbing trend here
more for realz stuff soon

[Neox]

haha cool guy with that hat, reminds me a little of that russian ded dude in hellboy ^^

[Justin Meisse]

a little after work doodle, getting used to my new Cintiq. Why oh why did I start with a white canvas
http://www.artbyjustin.com/images/draw/fishmonger.jpg

It seems I'm really falling into a rut of drawing the same faces all the time, mayhap it's time to get back to square one and do some life drawings.

[Justin Meisse]

Thanks to Cholden and Rhinokey I think I've gotten the hang of this high poly stuff so I'm going to go ahead and try doing a UT3 level.
more to come soon, I'm mainly trying to get in the groove of pumping out greeble-ish tech stuff at a fast pace.
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/ut3/ut3_techwal01.jpg
crits and suggestions appreciated

[hobodactyl]

Looking cool; is it a wall panel or what? Not sure what you're going for with this piece, but adding a bunch of useless stuff usually makes it look cool :D I did a quick paint over for some ideas:

http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa76/lordkhronos/paintover.jpg

[Justin Meisse]

I'll definately add some more details to the wall panel, I'm trying to walk the fine line between a clean look and too simple. The center techy thing is a seperate piece, the idea is to have fairly sparse panels and then extra tech pieces that I'll pop on to the panels to break up the look of the area.

[hobodactyl]

I think putting just a horizontal indention about 1/5 of the way up and then a simple horizontal pattern higher up could work. Something like corrugated tin horizontally up near the top. Just some ideas.

[Justin Meisse]

A bit crappy looking but I'm still experimenting getting used to trouble areas with normal mapping
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/ut3/ut3wall01.jpg

[Justin Meisse]

kind of liked how the wall pieces looked after I moved them apart to bake
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/ut3/ut3_techwall_02.jpg

oh yeah, style is like that Bjork video where the two robjorks totally do it!

[Mike_Carlyle]

lookin good justin, cant wait to see what u do with the finished scene.

[Justin Meisse]

still futzing around with shapes
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/ut3/ut3_techwall_04.jpg

[Justin Meisse]

argh, grungy bricks are much more satisfying! I think I might redo my sewer in UT3.
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/ut3/ut3_bricks_01.jpg

here's the crappy brick I used to build the wall
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/ut3/crappy_brick.jpg
My original sculpt was too many polies and things started to slow down once I dublicated it a few times so I re-exported a medium level brick and used that, it turned out pretty good. I was going to run a rock texture through the nvidia filter and overlay the normals but I don't have the plugin installed right now, when I do that will completely hide the any uglyness from the bricks. The only tweak I did to the normals was to blur the grout a little.

[Justin Meisse]

http://artbyjustin.com/images/draw/birdthing.jpg
see that funny looking thing below his beak? photoshp crashed and I had to do a printscreen to save my work! awesome!

[Kovac]

Cool features on that there bird there, Justin :)

The side mouth whiskers scare me.

[Justin Meisse]

Making me a desert scene,
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/desert/ut3_desert01.jpg

[Microneezia]

Looks very Square RPG, and so, I love it.

Ive been contemplating similar rocks I posted a reference rock shot I like... its from a Square game, they used Ued3 for Last Remnant not sure about this game... but i really like the striations in the rock, They are really detailed about their rocks... would you mind posting your flats? are these uniquely unwrapped? Id really appreciate it!

I dont want to put other pictures in your sketchbook but heres the link (http://microneezia.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/desertrocks.jpg)

looks really great man!

... can I interest you in a bargin basement desert temple? :P

[Justin Meisse]

They are using 2 tiling textures with vertex blending, here's the textures (resized from 2048)
http://artbyjustin.com/wip/desert/cliff_face01_DIF.jpg
http://artbyjustin.com/wip/desert/cliff_rock01_DIF.jpg

That screenshot is pretty cool, I'm actually thinking about redoing the striation image.

[Japhir]

2048) haha
very cool texture work!

[Microneezia]

Ya i get the feeling that the striations are maybe zbrushed and normal mapped, then they slap the brown wash overtop of that? hmm i just doubt it. I wouldnt put it past them to have such brilliant texture painters on hand to create the diffuse so well like this on a C-list game of theirs... Its hard to tell sometimes in a screenshot alone.

Let me ask you this maybe then since I bring it up, Ive been wondering this for a bit... do you think that on environments, its acceptable to say, uniquely unwrap the 5 rocks like yours for example... and just use normal maps specifically on the one uniquely unwrapped channel. Then, have a single tiling texture for all the rocks together on a 2nd channel, AO on 3rd ect. This way you get a nice unique unwrapped sculpted normal, but you can save a bit of the budget by using a tiling texture for color on all. This way all your rocks will look different, because of unique zbrush sculpting and have some tiling friendly qualities with color.... i think you get the idea? Have you seen this before?

Anyway your work reminded me of this screenshot! Good job man!

EDIT: 2048 seems large for those textures, even if they will be seen right up close, isnt that big? did you mean you resized them in the game or for the post?

Sorry, i guess they are just rocks, you are probably over talking about them, but i am overly interested in rocks... unfortunately for others around me, I could talk a long time about the look and nature of rocks

[Justin Meisse]

I'm planning to do maybe 4 or 5 different rock formations (right now there's only one pillar) and a few different cliff sets, I think it's faster and more efficient to just use the tiling textures although I'll probably do an AO bake for the entire rock set when I'm done.

For medium size rocks and boulders, I'll probably sculpt/texture them a bit more uniquely.

honestly, this is still fairly new to me, I've been doing mostly old school stuff until now.

I'll document the process for the next rock formation ;)

[Saidin311]

Hey man, just saying that I dig your 'book. I like that brick wall and the new rock formations. What about painting a simple black/white/grey version of the striated rock to filter through for normal maps? Might give you some better definition? My trials of Zbrush and Mudbox have expired so I'm also looking for ways to make good looking rocks with tiling textures! :)

[Justin Meisse]

Did this yesterday
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/zshield/c_shield01.jpg

more adjustments this morning, decided to do the eye as a subtool also used subtool master plugin to drop everything down to one mesh and do some scaling and transposing on the horns
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/zshield/shield02.jpg

[Justin Meisse]

Seeing about redoing my submission from the first Dom War, did a quick zsphere base, sculpted it up a bit and decided to retopo it to fix some bad flow areas
http://www.artbyjustin.com/wip/domredo/dom_redo01.jpg

I tried retopoing the shield at work but since it's composed of multiple polygroups, zbrush has trouble projecting the the details to the retopo, resulting in errors