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.