How much skin are you willing to bare?

Just kidding I've since deleted the files and you probably wouldn't have been able to get them to work for you anyway since you need a specialized suite of .dll's that control the sub division of the M7. (I may redo it at some point)


On a lighter note I (finally) finished up my High Definition Ithaca, please let me know of anything which is missing from this model in comparison to the real world version.



Generally the design it'self is rather mundane which is the prime feature which attracted me to it in the first place.



Perhaps the most detailed portion of this particular weapon would be what I am guessing is the gas tube/loading tube. I took particular care to make sure that no detail was skipped thus resulting in a rather fetching finished product.



The screw head pinned to the side of the mount in the top right is composed exclusively of floating geometry as are those peculiar circular indentions which form a perfect loop over the front fascia of what I perceive to be some gas/cap doodad.





Moving further down to the pump in particular makes up perhaps the second most visually enticing if not generic feature. Rather basic in it's design I found it a tad harsh to emulate the deformity conceived within the design of the true version, nevertheless I commissioned an FFD modifier to generate the slight "bulge" at crux.





Echo77 designated this rod like piece as having a part to play in the expelling of spent shells, unfortunately It was the single most troublesome component. Largely due to the fact that I could not collate decent reference images to attenuate a suitable scale hence the rather amateurish thickness and clipping. ;/ It haunts me still to this day.



Aside from that the receiver is third in line to the throne, not much to say here apart from the fact that it's conception was both highly pleasing and sensual.
(perhaps not that last one)



Rather annoyingly it has just occurred to me that I have not modelled in a shell insertion rail. Grrrrr!



Am I right in thinking this piece ties into to a safety aspect?





Trigger + mechanics make up the last of the middle portion again rather simple stuff nothing out of the realms of the ordinary.



Finally we take stock at well....The butt stock!



Lastly I will grace all of you stringent followers of the technical realms with wire geometry. (objects denoted with red edges are floating, blue are none)







By the way since capturing these images I have since realised that I had forgone the butt plate. This I assure you was entirely intentional and has nothing to do with my woeful IQ.




Thoughts, critique? All are neccassary before my Low definition preparations begin!

Some of my more "helpful" references.









Edited by SS Flanker on Jul 2, 2015 at 07:07 AM

On this, it's a tube magazine. Pump-action needs no gas system because it's cycled manually.


The button behind the trigger is the safety. The triangular-ish bit in front of the trigger is the bolt release which, if I remember correctly, basically unlocks the pump and allows it to be cycled.

All in all, it looks like an incredibly accurate recreation.
Edited by Echo77 on Jul 2, 2015 at 12:26 PM

Appreciate the corrections echo :)

Out of curiosity Don't cuss I decided to go and rip the GM6 (lynx) from COD. If you want the model I'll Ul it. (Haven't been able to capture frames for the scope :( )



Aside from that I have optimized my ithaca into a game ready form.



2130 tris might be questionable in this day an age for a game prop but this is 12+ yr old engine and a man has got to know his limits.







I would ignore the smoothing for the most part since the SG's are set up to accommodate texture spaced normal maps.

Uv's have been complete also:







Texel density has been my top priority. I prefer an overall general lower quality to the texture instead of mismatched pixel quality which is very noticeable on textures designed to take the most advantage of uv space.



Uv seams are of course unavoidable but for the most part they are located on the right side away from the general fp view.



Uv sheet > Textools was used in most instances.

I think that for the pump you could have done UVS with a simple cylinder before FFD applied, it would have made it more simple to edit. Although most of the parts looks fine to me, and it will be confirmed when baking normals.

Oh, and try to hide your seams, it may give nicer results depending on how lazy you are when texturing, for example that seam on the right of the barrel that could be on the polygons hidden right under it.
Edited by bourrin33 on Jul 6, 2015 at 09:34 AM

Your right since the FFD operation was relatively minor It wouldn't really stretch the textures out too much.

Unfortunately whilst I did do a normal bake test it didn't come out so well, This was principally due to the fact that I forgot the explode my mesh pieces to avoid projection bleeding.






All in all it was a descent clean bake I guess no baker related errors I just forgot to scatter out my individual intersecting mesh pieces as I stated above.

BTW I think I may go ahead and smooth out my Highres mesh since alot of the lighting details which are transferred via the NML map tend to lose visibility after being mip mapped down 1 scale.

I heard there would be Kalash.
*glances around*

k flanker

So, since I have basically finished the most important things in my mod, I started a full immersion into 3D modelling. I'm trying to see as far I can get with my own resources, so everything shown here has been made completely from scratch.
I made two sci-fi weapons, they're both custom and not Halo-related, but I used two different tecniques for them:

First tecnique

This weapon has been made modelling directly the low poly, and then texturing everything with my bare hands, included normals, specular and ambient occlusion:







I'm not sure if I'll keep the yellow light tracers, I'll probably replace them with red electric beams

Second tecnique

For this weapon, I'm following the standard modelling tecniques, so I started the high poly model, and I'm ready for baking:







I feel like the body is too blocky, though.

Any suggestions are welcome, of course, expecially from who has experience with this stuff
Edited by SOI_7 on Jul 23, 2015 at 02:46 PM

I love it. Whatever this is, keep 'em coming.
And you're right in that it looks too blocky boxy but I'm not a modeller so I've got 0 tips to give. :/

It looks great from the side, but the grip itself is what gives it the blocky look. Imagine curling your hand around that, it'd be like gripping a square. It looks like you chamfered a box gun and went from there. Not a bad place to start, but the grip needs work. I love how the normals look though, what was your process of making them? I personally create heightmaps and use that to edit my textures to give them fake AO and shading.

Since they're super sci-fi laser weapons, the only suggestions I can make are in regards to ergonomics. Try configuring the weapon (particularly the stock, pistol grip, and handguard) based on whatever is going to be firing it, be it alien or humanoid.

Started working on an M98B from BF4. Model was super simple to rig since there's really only 1 moving part so I got that going for me.

Animations can be seen here. You'll have to excuse the low res renders, that way I get more stuff done.

green = done, blue = WIP, red = not started
-----
origins - please note these have changed, will update soon
-----
idle
fire-1 (variant 1)
fire-1 (variant 2)
moving
reload-full
reload-empty
throw-grenade
Edited by War Master V on Jul 25, 2015 at 02:48 PM
Edited by War Master V on Jul 25, 2015 at 03:12 PM

Thanks for the feedback, guys! I've just finished the whole model, I probably need to add something to the diffuse map, since it's too bland. I have rounded the top of the stock and the foregrip, and made the main grip thinner and more ergonomical:







@Jesse: For the first weapon I used the same tecnique. I have hand painted the heightmap and then converted it to a normal map. The second weapon, though, has been made using Max's baking instruments, starting from an high poly model, in which the holes are actual geometry

Hello.

I have been struggling for adequate inspiration with which to apply to my custom "halo themed" assault rifle design which is based on the MA5B.

At the moment I am stuck furthering the design of the front cowling and upper receiver, I want to keep the design as moderately clean as the halo 3 MA5C but not as messed up and crazy as the Halo 4 variant.

Here is what I have so far.

(new accounts must wait 7 days to post links but I couldn't wait!)

http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/464688ma5burney1.png
http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/487626ma5burney2.png
Amateurish First Person View. (Apologies for the lack of light)

http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/229627ma5burney3.png

Magazine:

http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/358878ma5burney4.png
http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/163459ma5burney5.png

Wireframe:

http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/683546ma5burney6.png
http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/981245ma5burney7.png

As I said before this is not an all out copy of previous AR generations but at the same time it is not a complete re-design. I am just in need of some design ideas to take away and experiment with.

thnx for reading :)

I like where you're taking it.
Seems a little on the low-poly side but hopefully you'll be able to add in the smooths later on.
Keep at it.

http://savinpvtmike.deviantart.com/art/Br-55-Ud-8-4-2015-1-551096990?q=gallery%3Asavinpvtmike%2F43999898&qo=4

http://savinpvtmike.deviantart.com/art/Br-55-Ud-8-4-2015-2-551097139

The ejection port should be over the magazine, but ther than that it looks pretty good.

looks really good. I'm not sure about smoothing on this part http://puu.sh/jQiRn/7de7a51c23.png
White decals shouldn't be as bright, maybe they should be slightly scratched too.

Why are you rendering in the "User" camera!?

Forgive my ignorance, but... which camera should I use?

It looks like you're in orthographic view, which is a view (commonly known as "orthographic projection") that projects 3D objects in a more 2D-like view. Hit "P" on your keyboard to change it to perspective, which is how it should normally be.

Yes this, watch some modelling tutorials, any good tutorial should teach you this first. It's the most fundamental thing you should know.

Orthographic/User(3ds Max) views for one look bad, but mainly don't give you a realist representation of what your model looks like within a game. I have never actually found a use for the view to be honest.

Always use one of the following when modelling: Perspective; Front; Back; Side; Top; Bottom. No others :D

Do that and I can give you some crit on the model.

Only time I ever used orthographic view was when I wanted to edit some really small changes that when zoomed in perspecitve view the model would clip.

I totally ignored the existence of the perspective view, every tutorial I watched didn't mention it... well, I guess I watched the wrong ones.

Anyway, here you are:







Feel free to point out whatever you want, these models are essentially for practice

1. It all seems a bit low-res, all the edges to shapes seem rather blury on the texture/normals.

2. Watch some texturing tutorials, your making them all wrong, you can't just stick a base texture on it and let the normals do the work. You need to take into account what that part of the weapon would be made from.

3. Your normals need fixing after you bake them, for example on the end of your barrel.

4. Where is the design from? It's hard to make a bad looking design look good, this one seems a bit all over the place. To have a weapon look "realistic" or just general convincing it needs to look sort of functional, this doesn't really look functional. The grip looks way to small for the barrel section of the weapon and the grip doesn't look too, well, grippy, looks like it would be difficult to hold when it's a bit wet as it would get slippy.

Needs some generally more interesting shapes, and no textured on glowing stuff...

Thanx you guys! Sorry for making you wait but I took the opportunity to Sub'D my kalash.



As far as challenges go this one tops my list. Nearly everything on the model is a fully functioning entity, meaning no floaters of any kind. (apart from the mag insert which is just a fancy plane)





Topology wise I took a real "devil may care" attitude. Pretty much as long as it looked good from every possible angle and regardless of the edge flow then I really couldn't be bothered to alter the mesh just for the sake of sexay wires.



Here is an exploded view of all the mesh pieces which make up this AK. I should note that in some certain areas it wasn't really practical to lay out the mesh as it would look in real life. But most of the important pieces are as they would be in the real world.

(Upper, Lower, Heat sink, Rails, Magazine, Barrel+gas tube)

I may release this model unless anyone can find any flaws. ATM the only thing bothering me right now is the general hardness of some of the surfaces. Perhaps I'll revise and relax some of my control edges.
Edited by SS Flanker on Aug 30, 2015 at 10:17 AM

1. I'm using a 512x512 texture... I guess I need to up-res it

2. I've actually included an AO and cavity map on the diffuse, but it doesn't matter. Do you have any tutorial to suggest me? It would be good to take reference from the same guide

3. I guess you're talking about those zig-zag lines. I'll fix everything

4. I'm trying to build everything from scratch, concept included, so the design is completely custom. It's the first time I'm doing something not Halo-related, so I'm taking much more freedom.

Overall, I think I'll remake it from scratch instead of fixing it here and there. Just out of curiosity, though: I've seen your previous models, mainly the Thorn Beast, and they're quite impressive, but most of them are bipeds or organics. Have you ever messed with weapons? I'd like to see the approach you used with them, and also to know which tutorials you followed for them

1. Yeah upres it, use at least 1024 these days.

2. Depending on the game your putting it in these kind of maps are sometimes bad to use these days, thanks to dynamic AO, but parts can use them.

3. Yeah, the wavy lines need to be fixed.

4. Fair enough, maybe merge existing strong designs together.

80% of my models are weapons tbh, I have done a lot of Halo weapons and vehicles in the past, tbh I have never finished texturing any of them, but I have got an upcoming project which will be modelled and textured to completion.

Not too sure on tutorials, just do some good Google searches to find a good one.

Looks very pretty! However, I would go and separate out the barrel assembly, if you're doing separate pieces, might as well go all the way. I'm not experienced with this exact design, but typically, the barrel assembly would consist of the pieces of the sight, the barrel, the gas return thing, the gas return tube, and (sometimes) a has return tube shroud. Other than that possibility, looks beautiful.

Further progress regarding my MA5b custom interpretation. Unsure about cheek rest.

damn dude, that looks cool. maybe curve the ammo counter more? overall it could be alot smoother

I, personally, would make a smoother cheek rest. There's a lot going on with it, and it doesn't seem terribly practical at all as is. Also, for your flashlight, I would not suggest modelling it as an impact weapon, but that's just details. Also, that thing that sticks out in the middle of the magazine looks a bit funky. The inside of the handrest could use some chamfer love, and maybe a little bit along hte front of it too.

I like the design, and it's very nicely detailed, the front especially. Do look forward to seeing more.

I'm not really a fan, it is essentially just a load of extrudes and intrudes, no real design or change to it... Curves are not even smoothed.

Topology of insets and other tools used hasn't been cleaned up, see back of the grip. SOOOO many wasted triangles.

Come up with some kind of design instead of just extrude a load of faces.

I do like it, but like the others have been saying, there's a lot of 'noise' per se.
There is beauty in simplicity.

I like the direction, but I think there might be a bit too many extrudes near the back and on the grip. The problem that I have is simply that, visually, it is really busy. I think you could definitely go easy on the extrudes in the rear of the gun and on the grip. That grip looks...painful to hold...

Edited by DarkHalo003 on Sep 2, 2015 at 04:06 PM