Environmental/Prop/Material Artist - Josh Brooker

2009-12-03T01:24:00.000-08:00

Pictures are shown in sequence of the stages of development

Final Result:

All models use Diffuse, Normal, and Specular maps.

Titantron animation on youtube:
[flash=800,640]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cSo7odiIzY[/flash]

Environmental Props - Cityscape

2009-08-28T20:26:00.001-07:00

I began work on a police station that I will continue to populate with common city props, such as street lamps, mail boxes, and benches. There are only 2 building models, with the 1st being instanced. The second is only slightly modified to make room for the entrance and stairs. So far, the biggest challenge has been deciding how to reuse the same UV space for both models. I've seen other artists do it, so i imagine that it will be an essential skill for me to learn. For example, my friend Alex Underhill has done something that wowed me, where he used the same UV space on a 2048² texture for every model in his scene.
Link

Little things like this show me that currently I am far from being the artist I want to be. I plan to continue learning these methods as I continue working on this scene. My estimated time to complete this project is 1 month.

Mapping frustration

2009-08-26T17:52:00.000-07:00

Lately i've been spending a lot of time studying materials and mapping methods. UV Mapping is a complex and frustrating art, and trying to get a clean layout is difficult for anyone starting out. A friend shared a few things with me to help me along, and what i've learned so far is that its best to aim for a layout with all uv chunks split at the hard edges. Not only does this help to achieve a smoother mesh, but it allows you to texture corners with no obvious seams. For example, i could texture rust around a corner without a split on the edge, which would look really bad to the observant.

Another frustration i've had lately is to actually understand the differences between object-space and tangent-space normal mapping. Especially generating a good one. I frequently use Crazybump to generate Normals from height maps, but I really need to be using Zbrush to generate them. Not only will they come out better, but they will be more exact since they are created from a high poly model.

I found an excellent article on this subject here. Maybe if you are interested in the subject, it will be of use to you.

First post

2009-08-25T13:33:00.000-07:00

I started this blog to showcase some of my 3d work for anyone to see. I dont have alot to show at this point, as iv'e only recently developed a workflow to take a model from start to finish.

First up is a creative reinvisionment of the voice-key thingy from the GoldenEye movie. I created this for the Half-Life 2 mod, GoldenEye: Source, in which i am a prop modeler and lead texture artist for. It is one of the first models I have finished completely that makes use of next-gen shader technology and is able to be imported into a game engine.

Lately I've spent my time studying a variety of programs, including Unreal Engine, Maya 2009, Zbrush, and Crazybump. I've learned to improve the quality of my surface maps, and to unwrap properly. As my college experience chugs along further, i hope to be able to pull off more complex works, as well as learn to import models into the Unreal3 Engine to populate my own complete maps.