Grenade Launcher

This will be the first post I make with the subject not being finished yet.  I am trying my hand at making the M32 Grenade Launcher.

What I want to accomplish with this piece is a level of detail and refinement I feel I have not gotten from my other pieces. Something that I feel like I have been doing is using too little polys.  With this piece, I want to allow myself to delve into more detail at the cost of efficiency to see how high of a quality I can attain.  After playing the game Far Cry 4 and seeing the level of detail that went into those weapons, I know that I will have to be able to reach that level of detail if I am to compete in the video game industry.

What I have done so far.

This has already gotten up to 3500 polys and will very likely be more before I am finished with it.

Roman legionnaire helmet

Disclaimer: This was an already completed project and I am taking you through the process after it had already been completed.

As a big fan of ancient Rome, I decided I wanted to make the helmet that the roman infantry used. As always, I gathered some reference images.

This is the low poly, this ended up going through some transformations because I had more trouble with this model than I thought I was going to.

The high poly also had to go through some changes to make it easier for baking the AO and normal maps

The first bakes I did through xNormals ended up pretty rough.  Their was no easy way to make the envelope fit well, so I ended up having to move it by hand, which easily took me 2 hours of refining.

Their were problems with the normals bleeding into other parts of the model where they should not have been. And the AO was not hugging the edges that well  and tended to be too far away.

The most annoying part was that I could not use the global extrusion slider because increasing the envelope globally cause all sorts of problems, such as normals bleeding into other geometry.

After a couple hours of refinement, I ended up with something better, but there was still some more cleanup to be done.

So what I ended up doing was hand fixing the textures in Photoshop. I meticulously hand fixed the normal, AO, and curvature map.  It was very annoying.

So after most of these problems were ironed out, I started to flesh out the texture more, adding a diffuse and spec map.  This is also the first time  I played around with a specularity map that consisted of colors outside grayscale.  These next pictures were when I started to render it in Marmoset Toolbag

I decided that I wanted the metal to give off a copper specularity.  This went through many iterations until I was satisfied. I changed the color of the base metal itself, I changed color of the yellow metal to a more yellow red hue, and the spec map went through many changes with the color intensity's ranging quite a bit. I also played around with multiple lighting setups.

This is what I ended up with.

This was a more complex  piece compared to what I  have done in terms of shape, which gave me many small problems along many of the edges.  But I learned some ways to overcome that and was able to start understanding  more about different materials specularities.

Sawed off Shotgun

Disclaimer: This was an already completed project and I am taking you through the process after it had already been completed.

My process of how I made the sawed off shotgun

It started with reference of course

Using this I made this first low poly model.  (Some clean up work had already been done at this point.)

And the high poly

Baking the Ambient occlusion with the high and low poly models got this as a result

What I like to do when texturing is to just throw some textures on the model regardless of how it looks to see what the texture looks like on the 3D model itself.

After fixing up the texture more and making a spec and normal map, I decided to add some scroll work to the side of the gun to add some more interesting elements.  I rendered this shot using Marmoset Toolbag and got this as a result.  A lot of people thought the barrel being so damaged and the handle being so clean was strange, which is understandable.  So far I understand how metal weathers and how its specularity changes, but not so much when it comes to wooden materials.

After changing the specularity, altering the colors a bit and reducing the wear and tear on the metal parts of the gun, I ended up with this, which I think looks better overall.  It ended up being 1616 tris.

This I believe, was the start of me being able to apply the skills I have learned and really put it all together to make a piece that I think is on the way to becoming very good.