Derringer 9mm Pistol

supaclueless

Been working on this at the moment. Finally moved from Toolbag 2 to 3 and this is my first attempt at trying out some new stuff like realtime GI and new lighting setup in there.

I want to personally thank Marmoset on the awesome toolkit they have, will be trying out their baker in the future as well. The idea of cleaning up skewed normals is REALLY enticing.

Playing around with the scene setup to git gud at having nicer presentations and used several old props I had for the backdrop. This is the Highpoly with color materials only. Will now be focusing on making the lowpoly next.

Gazu

Nice Weapon. Do you want to bake this Weapon?

supaclueless

Yup, once I have the lowpoly done I will be baking and texturing it.

supaclueless

Finally managed to get the bakes and lowpoly done for this. Now onward to texturing! (and fixing a slight normal shading bug I found after making these images)

CrackRockSteady

Bake looks nice, looking forward to the final textures

supaclueless

Managed to get somewhere with texturing, still want to tweak a bunch of stuff and whatnot. finally able to get back on this piece, been a sorta busy month. Noodling around with image-taking as well.

Polygoblin

The bottom of your bullet shouldn't have the mark from the firing pin. Only spent casing does. Also some doughy edges around the top of that barrel. it'd be worth a rebake to get more support edges in there and better define those details. stands out as-is

supaclueless

Yea, alongside the wooden grip having a weak close-up poly silhouette and certain sections being too doughy (a problem I sometimes have when trying to get soft edges that don't just get aliased in 20-30% view vs. close up proper hard edges for 80% view shots), those are some areas i might revisit.

Also thanks for pointing out the firing pin mark! I personally did not know that it originated from the hammer contacting the bullet and thought it was a design choice by bullet manufacturers, shows how much i know about bullets.

supaclueless

Wrapping this up much later than I desired. Chugging NyQuil was fun for a week. So many on-and-off periods for this.

I still think there are some places where I can improve in terms of things like improving pipeline speeds and certain areas in texturing for sure. This is also my first throw at creating a wooden grip from scratch. Not really satisfied with it but I think its "passable" for now, need to study more on getting gud.

More shots and Marmoset viewer in my artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8n2Am

Macebo

Hey @supaclueless! 

Your High poly, low poly and bakes came really nice and clean, congrats!

But the textures i believe could be ajusted a little. The wooden grip could be a lot less saturated. As it stand, it looks like those amateurish renders, with super saturated colors. I don't know the reference that you went for, but take a look at how the wood, while similar to yours, is a lot less saturated:



Also, the screws and bolts are too reflectant, this results in a huge, unpleasant contrast between the black main body of the gun and the little pieces and hammer. If i were you, i'd drastically lower the specular values of those parts. They should looks more like opaque metal than chrome. Even on the reference above, the main frame of the gun is more reflectant than the bolts and screws.

Other than that, pretty solid piece

supaclueless

@Macebo Thanks for the critique and feedback, updated my post and ! After post inside marmoset, the harsher contrast made the wood grip look over saturated as you noted. It definitely looks nicer now to complement the black surface of the frame.

Also in regards to the screws I had it more akin to stainless steel based on a reference I used but having them be more rougher and less reflective does remove the sharp contrast between the surfaces.

On an unrelated note, DDO screwed me over by having me be unable to unflatten my psd files so i cannot manipulate any of my materials anymore, RIP.

Macebo

Cheers @supaclueless, looks much better now. I'm glad that you took my opinion with good heart

Shrike

I have to disagree, the bake is too soft and screws with the material definition, it looks blobby and plustered. Also the edges are very even across the board regardless of the part, on the reference the edges surely vary from soft to sharp and anything in between. 
With the soft edges, the metal looks like a strange type of plastic right now.
The texture has the small scale detail it needs, but is lacking on the large and medium scale detail that sells the texture in the end.
The current edge definition is very thin and in partially strange places, it looks like obviously made with substance painter, try some more broad strokes and look at some references for good textures and do it manually. When you know how it is supposed to look you can try to generate it with painter. Think where it would apply and compliment the model the most. 

Nam.Nguyen

Shrike said:

I have to disagree, the bake is too soft and screws with the material definition, it looks blobby and plustered. Also the edges are very even across the board regardless of the part, on the reference the edges surely vary from soft to sharp and anything in between. 
With the soft edges, the metal looks like a strange type of plastic right now.

This,

A lot of people seem to follow a rule that makes the edge more bevel, to avoid aliasing in game, and have more pixels on normal map. In my experience, it not worth it especially with realistic FPS assets

Macebo

Nam.Nguyen said:

Shrike said:

I have to disagree, the bake is too soft and screws with the material definition, it looks blobby and plustered. Also the edges are very even across the board regardless of the part, on the reference the edges surely vary from soft to sharp and anything in between. 
With the soft edges, the metal looks like a strange type of plastic right now.

This,

A lot of people seem to follow a rule that makes the edge more bevel, to avoid aliasing in game, and have more pixels on normal map. In my experience, it not worth it especially with realistic FPS assets

 That is more something to keep in mind than a rule... The width of the bevels is really dependant on the use of the model (RTS, 3rd person etc) 

supaclueless

In all honesty I mostly agree with you, I have a bad habit of emphasizing soft edges too much. Now that I am hanging this piece up for now, I do know that I probably approached my edges more akin to a TPS model rather than a close-up FPS asset which was actually my goal so I kind of failed there but remedying this is easy enough (tighten edges).

In the grand scheme of things I made many mistakes and bad approaches. I should have chamfered the hammer and made most of the metallic items more harder which was actually the case for the screws. Also should have chamfered some corners to prevent "blobbiness" for things like the trigger switch and the upper part of the frame holding the barrel since the user would be seeing that section 90% of the time so going all out on areas of main focus for geo should have been arbitrary.

Texturing was a mess here for certain parts. My base definition was okay-ish here but the edge wear was extremely awful even after a couple of redos and even the final variant doesnt gel as nicely as I would like. I actually did not really want too many macro surface wear for it because I wanted the pistol to be less "weathered" and only contain the sort of damage most maintained weaponry in an urban setting might have rather than having the weapon go through something like Vietnam.

Also to clarify; I textured this with Quixel but yes, I do feel like the weapon is an in-between of a "generic parametric mash of materials without any manual work done" and an actual proper piece. I think my current plan is to do some more rudimentary texturing where I REALLY try to PUSH a simple asset and give it some story in different situations (IE: brand new, kept over time, battered)

Thanks for the critiques and comments though! The worst thing that can happen for me is designing inside a bubble or having people just praising me without giving good advice.

Shrike

Nam.Nguyen said:

Shrike said:

I have to disagree, the bake is too soft and screws with the material definition, it looks blobby and plustered. Also the edges are very even across the board regardless of the part, on the reference the edges surely vary from soft to sharp and anything in between. 
With the soft edges, the metal looks like a strange type of plastic right now.

This,

A lot of people seem to follow a rule that makes the edge more bevel, to avoid aliasing in game, and have more pixels on normal map. In my experience, it not worth it especially with realistic FPS assets

It really depends on the viewing distance and the edge, generally it should be softer than real life but there is a certain range for every type of edge. For a third person production model with no means of portfolio display in big images, the current edges would be fitting.