[WIP] Concussion Pistol Firearm

Dan Powell · Dec 2015

Current Progress: Finished!
- Any feedback is welcomed.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1bPze
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Hi Polycount!

I'm posting to share a 3D weapon I've been working on. I've made guns before, but this is an original concept of my own that has used some existing concepts as inspiration to form an idea. Creating a new gun in itself is a huge challenge from a design point of view, especially for someone who typically doesn't produce original concept art, but instead models from existing work.

I began the process by silhouetting designs; casual method of exploring various shapes, often through recycling successful aspects of previous silhouettes. For example, silhouettes 1 to 9, as well as 16, all use the same grip and trigger design.

From there, I produced the concept art for the piece. The concept art was built using a 3D blockout underneath, with a paintover on the top layer - 2D is not my strong point, hence my decision to block it out in 3D first, though I do appreciate that this process can often be restrictive when it comes to iteration.

The gun itself is designed to be a practical, futuristic, energy-based pistol which has various attachments to transform it into a rifle. Essentially, it gives players the freedom to tweak their weapons to their preferences, with different attachments granting various perks.

One of the additions I made was the Scanner, which flips out on the side of the gun. This was inspired by Wouter Gort's concept art. (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/royal-marechaussee-police-revolver)

Below, I've attached renders of my current high poly 3D model. The design of the gun itself has had significant changes since the Concept art; this is my own project, so I felt I could take as much artistic freedom as I want if it meant improving the overall design.

(Note: There's a couple of tiny, black shading errors on the object. These won't appear in the bake, and I'm assuming they're being due to the amount of stress on Marmoset when it's rendering several million polygons.)

Once again, feedback welcomed. Cheers folks!

aaronmwolford · Dec 2015

Design-wise the concept is very "boxy" and lacks an interesting silhouette. The stock could use some rounded edges on the underside. Other than the concept issues your highpoly has very sharp edges and will give you baking issues. Try rounding your edges a bit on larger corners mostly where two faces come to a 90 degree corner. This will also help with the "boxyness" of the design. Keep up the work.

Dan Powell · Dec 2015

aaronmwolford said:

Design-wise the concept is very "boxy" and lacks an interesting silhouette. The stock could use some rounded edges on the underside. Other than the concept issues your highpoly has very sharp edges and will give you baking issues. Try rounding your edges a bit on larger corners mostly where two faces come to a 90 degree corner. This will also help with the "boxyness" of the design. Keep up the work.

Hi Aaron, cheers for the feedback.

Regarding the concept, I agree - it is quite a blocky, boxy gun, though to some extent this was an intentional route I pursued. The squarish shapes, with a dense silhouette, helped emphasise the 'brute force' aspect of the gun, whereas the extended rifle version has a less dense silhouette, and therefore, what I felt conveyed a more precision-based variation of the gun.

The actual original silhouette I worked from is in the bottom-right of the concept art, though I appreciate that I have since removed the silencer-like attachment at the front. Does that blank, black and white silhouette convey a visual interest within itself - has this been lost on the 3D transition?

I'll loosen up the control edges on the areas on the 90 degree turns, and where they're slightly sharper on smaller assets. I'll post pics of the bake and lowpoly once I have done those.

I'm not too sure what you mean regarding the roundness of the stock on the underside, as the bottom is rounded off, as shown;

Again, cheers for the feedback!

Dan Powell · Jan 2016

Have been at my parent's over Christmas so haven't been able to post any updates till now - Only had my Laptop; the poor thing can barely load 3DS Max 2016!

Quick low-poly plus baked normals shot inside of Marmoset. Going to get the two AO passes done for the various positions of the scanner on the side.

Dan Powell · Jan 2016

Had to rebake the normal to fix a few errors that I'd missed. AO is also baked now. Frustratingly, Windows decided to update mid-bake, cancelling the last 2 hours of my AO bake. Had to do the whole thing again.

Started to add some detailing in nDo - gone quite far from my original concept, but I think I've improved it.

maatin · Jan 2016

I like the boxy design, and I think i get what you mean with the "brute force" thing. It kinda reminds me of the rifle in the movie Oblivion.
Nice work!
Wow, too bad with the AO bake but how long does your bake usually take? baking for 2 hours seems like an eternity

Dan Powell · Jan 2016

maatin said:

I like the boxy design, and I think i get what you mean with the "brute force" thing. It kinda reminds me of the rifle in the movie Oblivion.
Nice work!
Wow, too bad with the AO bake but how long does your bake usually take? baking for 2 hours seems like an eternity

Thanks.

I tend to go a bit overkill with my bakes. In XNormal I had this set to 4K, 256 casts, 4x Anti-Aliasing so the AO result is quite nice in the end. Had to bake two of them as well - one for when the scanner's open, and one for closed; as it's a still render (but I have done the animation for the open-close sequence just to check my measurements worked.)

Plus, I had XNormal set to low priority under Task Manager, so that I could still do other things on the PC; slowing it down a bit

The actual texture is 4K on it at the moment too. Looking back, there's probably more space I could have saved on the UVs by overlapping, but I was concerned about doing so because there's text on the gun, which would be backwards when mirrored.

Dan Powell · Jan 2016

AO and Normals finished in nDo. Gonna get the Colour ID baked out then will get on with the materials. Looking to get this done within the next couple of days.

Dan Powell · Jan 2016

Progress on the textures.

Using Quixel Suite to get some nice base materials down. When I'm done I'll manually add some decals like stickers, logos, etc.

I'm aware there's a seam issue on the Handle - will fix this when I've finished everything else by painting a bit of wear/tear over it.

Constructive criticism is appreciated, though preferably, feedback that I can actually apply to the mesh is most helpful - so that I can actually improve it, though if people have tips for the future that's great too!

I guess you can really see how the concept's evolved through the thread, too. It's worth noting that the original artwork was never something for me to rigidly stick to, but more to get an idea about the sort of shapes, texture styles, colours, etc. I was working towards. Hopefully the final thing looks a lot better than the original art.