Everyone gets one! AR-15 / VLTOR M4!
polycounter lvl 13
EDIT:
LATEST IMAGE:
FINISHED! Also made some animations:
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGaH3EzZ8KY"]M4 VLTOR - FPS Weapon Animation - - YouTube[/ame]
ORIGINAL POST:
So I've had an m4 blocked out for like a year and I never went with it. Some weeks ago I decided to actually make a high poly of it and finish my first ever real high poly weapon.
Every 3d artist gets one! At some point in our lives that lightbulb in our head comes on we say to ourselves "you know what the game art world really needs? Another M4!" Well here's mine!
Here is where I'm at with the high poly so far:
It's mostly done but there are some missing bits (for instance, the clamp thing-a-ma-jigs on the mounts and the rear folding sight), and bits that I want to clean up so the aliasing wont be too bad. (Like the adjusting things on the aimpoint scope, changing the grippy bit (yeah, get ready for more jibberish because I can't think of the names) to much thicker indents.)
I'm not too anal about accuracy (as long as it looks nice overall and clearly resembles the right parts, I'm making my own adjustments where I want to) but if you could let me know what you think and throw some comments, suggestions/crits that would be cool. I'll be making a low poly out of this too, and will consider doing a little bit of animation. I used to really enjoy animating first person weapons ages ago and It will be nice to play around with it.
I have made some adjustments to make life a little bit easier though, like making the rail in a way that will allow me to bake it in fewer polygons and avoid aliasing, and I made the barrel freakin' long so it would actually show up in the first person view (also the barrel will most likely be re done as it's very bland at the moment.
Thinking about adding a flashlight to the bottom rail but it might be a bit much.
A couple things:
-I'm very aware of the bad edges along the bottom of the rail in the middle and will be fixing them
-Magpul looks a bit off at the moment, may change that
-Some edges may get softened up because I realise they may not come out too well in a bake.
-Some of the floaters will get replaced / modelled into the mesh (like the ones on/near the stock)
Updates soon!
edit:
Also, thinking a bit far ahead but I think I'll probably go with snow camo, nobody ever makes snow camo weapons anymore.
..Maybe
LATEST IMAGE:
FINISHED! Also made some animations:
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGaH3EzZ8KY"]M4 VLTOR - FPS Weapon Animation - - YouTube[/ame]ORIGINAL POST:
So I've had an m4 blocked out for like a year and I never went with it. Some weeks ago I decided to actually make a high poly of it and finish my first ever real high poly weapon.
Every 3d artist gets one! At some point in our lives that lightbulb in our head comes on we say to ourselves "you know what the game art world really needs? Another M4!" Well here's mine!
Here is where I'm at with the high poly so far:
It's mostly done but there are some missing bits (for instance, the clamp thing-a-ma-jigs on the mounts and the rear folding sight), and bits that I want to clean up so the aliasing wont be too bad. (Like the adjusting things on the aimpoint scope, changing the grippy bit (yeah, get ready for more jibberish because I can't think of the names) to much thicker indents.)
I'm not too anal about accuracy (as long as it looks nice overall and clearly resembles the right parts, I'm making my own adjustments where I want to) but if you could let me know what you think and throw some comments, suggestions/crits that would be cool.
I'll be making a low poly out of this too, and will consider doing a little bit of animation. I used to really enjoy animating first person weapons ages ago and It will be nice to play around with it.I have made some adjustments to make life a little bit easier though, like making the rail in a way that will allow me to bake it in fewer polygons and avoid aliasing, and I made the barrel freakin' long so it would actually show up in the first person view (also the barrel will most likely be re done as it's very bland at the moment.
Thinking about adding a flashlight to the bottom rail but it might be a bit much.
A couple things:
-I'm very aware of the bad edges along the bottom of the rail in the middle and will be fixing them
-Magpul looks a bit off at the moment, may change that
-Some edges may get softened up because I realise they may not come out too well in a bake.
-Some of the floaters will get replaced / modelled into the mesh (like the ones on/near the stock)
Updates soon!
edit:
Also, thinking a bit far ahead but I think I'll probably go with snow camo, nobody ever makes snow camo weapons anymore.
..Maybe
Replies
it looks like a normal map and not real rail indentations
would be nice if lonewolf dropped by to crit you. he's done a lot of gun stuff and super detailed M4 already
Why? when its such a prominent detail from FPV, and, if you're sure you wanna do that, you could bake it solid without the "fillers" anyway...
or maybe something a bit fancier like this?
You know what'd be cool? Doing a crazy awesome painted diffuse for this thing.
What you have now looks like the Tangodown, (http://www.cgwgun.com/images/products/TDBG16.gif)
Just looks slightly blocky IMO.
Also, hard to tell, but can you post a front/rear photo as the receiver/grip area kinda looks a bit thick. Maybe it's just the perspective.
The front grip is really too thin, it'd be quite not comfy after a while. ( http://tactical-mod.ca/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/t/d/tdlongfg-folg-1.jpg)
Lastly, I think the forward area (Barrel and flashhider) could use a bit more details
Aimpoint and Magnifier are crazy good looking!
Do not agree at all, then you're getting totally random ray hits as you have large gaps in the model. What he's doing makes a whole lot more sense. He can also easily create a color mask from the bits modeled into the cutouts, and make those areas black in the texture. Personally though I would exaggerate some nice fat bevels there, as just placing a little box in there means not much interesting edge detail.
Generally I would model the rails into the lowpoly myself, but you've got scopes and sights obscuring much of the rail so its not a big deal. On the other hand. you could simply model in the rail cutouts that will be seen and optimize the ones that sit under the attachments, shouldn't add much at all to the total tri count. I always try to model rails in properly unless I have a really low tri budget.
Overall the model looks great, nice clean and accurate modeling. I would like to see some fatter edges, exaggerate some elements for a little more pop and to have a bit more variance on your edge widths in general to differentiate the different material types, but thats getting pretty nit-picky.
I'm calling zebra print on this, would look awesome
Saved to inspiration folder!
I agree with EQ too, but I bet you could get away with just baking the rail cutouts. The ones you modeled are not too steep/deep. I've seen some in-game weapons that do this and you can't tell they're flat in FPV.
Looking awesome though! Can't wait to see how you texture style comes into play with a realistic weapon.
+1. Yeah, wutt :0
Anyway, I think this looks real nice
You are right about the grip, I will change it to something a little more interesting. I'll probably pick one with grooves in it as I like the larger details.
@ nicafornica
yeah one of the sides are a little too straight at the moment.
More soon-ish-maybe-kinda.
it's not a double edge either, the 2 meshes are the same.
-I would also select all of the verts in that area and weld it.
Simple fix if that's what it is. The hp is looking nice so far though. What's your rendering set-up?
But that still doesn't solve it, and there was no creasing to begin with. No additional edges to weld and i've tried resetting x-form and I'm still getting this weird result.
For rendering I'm just using a Skylight with a mid red color, a couple omni's and the scanline renderer, tried mental ray but I swear it just blurs to fuck out of everything and it ends up looking nothing like the model in the viewport.
Ok, problem solved, when I said before that welding didnt solve it that was because I was only attempting to weld geometry around the area of the problem, selected all and welded and it got rid of it. It was one vert causing the problem, instead of accepting it and moving on, I looked for that damn vert and found it on the other side of the model with no connection whatsoever to the affected edges, not even close.. Even when I collapsed it manually it didn't fix it, only using weld fixed it, which makes no sense... it's the same result.
Oh Max, you silly goose.
(But that still doesnt explain why when I detached the affected polygons it didn't help, I guess Max is just weird.)
Well, thanks for the help!
edit:
ah sorry, double post
--
Kinda
Still got to clean up some edges which are too sharp, and fix a bit more stuff on the other side, but nearly there.
Happier that the barrel is more visible in the first person view now.
Threw in some super old hands for the sake of it.
(i'm sure the flip up probably won't be used but I'm nit picky about rifles and firearms. Common sense dictates law in warfare.)
u have some inaccuracies but who cares it looks cool
but one thing ill point out is that those magnifiers are suppose to flip side way, and your mount looks locked, if ya wanna change..
@ lonewolf
Thanks man.
@ JoshC That rear folding sight can go on either way according to the references I gathered, I may flip it around though so the sight is actually visible, instead of the base blocking it.
u can go with that one, its considerably more simple to model and wont take as much polys as the other ones ( like i used, was pain in the ass )
Well I went for that one, I've started it so far, but I think I'm also gonna have to make an lt-129 for the scope in front as well, just for consistency. As I don't really like how the different mount shapes are looking together on the sides at the moment. Should look cleaner afterwards.
Just gotta redo these scope mounts, make a more interesting grip, maybe a few minor proportion tweaks then I'm gonna get started on a low poly.
Did a bit more tonight, I added more to the mag, cleaned up quite a few edges, fixed some scale issues in various places and did the remaining pieces
Other side is still rather simple, but I'm not too fussed, I wanna focus on first person stuff.
I'm gonna start on a low poly tomorrow hopefully.
Would also like to get some info about your render setup and materials, fun to see how others do it.
Spotted what might be some pinching, don't know if it's even worth to fix
Really nice model. I really like the way you handled the edges. There are lots of really hard to make shapes on the gun, but you pulled it off. As for the pinching there that Stromberg90 pointed out... well I know you know what to do about that so I'm not going to say anything about it.