wh40k bolter gun

lefix

i wanted to start a couple small projects to prepare a portfolio. i picked a bolter gun from the wh40k universe.

started with the highpoly, subd modeling is starting to work quite well. i had a couple references for this, they all were different from each other. so i kinda did my own version of it, picking the parts i liked most from all refs.


and the low poly (1397 tris) for bakes:


first bake results were kinda meh, alot has to be cleaned up, and i'm not quite sure this is the best result i can get. so tips are welcome. a quick preview of the ao bake on the lowpoly, and the ao/normal bakes.



theres some wierd gradiends on supposedly flat surfaces in the normal map, is this normal? or did i fuck up somehow?. i also tried to build a projection cage, but the result was horrible

again, any crits are welcome. i'm not in a hurry, so i don't mind having to go back a few strps to fix things if i have to. my primary goal is to get the whole workflow down, and learn everything there is to learn about these techniques.

Swizzle

Those weird gradients happen when you have soft normals when you go to bake. Sometimes you can fix it by splitting edges, though that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Take a look in the normal mapping thread in technical talk for more info about it.

If you're just interested in using this as a portfolio piece, you could probably get away with using object-space normals instead of tangent space and save yourself a lot of headaches. I know for a fact that Marmoset has object-space normal support, so you could try 'em out and see if you like it.