Pimp my AR15.
polycounter lvl 17
A few Marmoset renders...
Hi Guys,
I needed to try out a new boolean workflow and get to grips with Substance Painter properly. I felt a gun would be a good candidate for my portfolio as my old one was non-PBR and looked a bit obsolete!
I found a suitable candidate on Instagram. A customized AR15. I wasn't aiming to directly model this but use it as a springboard for the final model. At the texturing stage I found another AR15 and liked its Gold and Black colour scheme.
HIGHPOLY
For reference photos I traced the weapon manufactures mentioned in the Instagram post and found most of the gun parts and grabbed the highest resolution pics I could find. Some of them even had videos which helped a lot. A few key parts I could not get, notably the upper-reciever but found one similar. For some parts I chose more interesting shapes instead.
In 3dsmax I modelled each piece seperately using a good reference photo in the background. Usually I started with a box or a spline extrusion and modelled cutting pieces for boolean operations. Simpler parts were made with Subdiv / Opensubdiv techniques or even just basic box modelling.
I knew some parts would need Zbrush for the final stages. Either for simple edge polishing like on the Sight but also for tricky places like on the Drum magazine. Zbrushes boolean ops were more suited.
The final hipoly a mix of 3dsmax and zbrush decimated meshes for baking.
LOWPOLY
Booleans shine here as I could dial down the subdivisions in cutting meshes and splines and end up with an almost finished lowpoly mesh. Some minor welding / merging and job done. The zbrush models were decimated then retop'd in 3dsmax. Sometimes some meshes were partly zbrush retopo partly 3dsmax boolean combined as one mesh eg Drum Magazine.
The final lowpoly I got down to 62k tris. Take into account the gun has approximately 200 + holes (mainly barrel/drum mag) and 40 bullets (each being 378 polys!) I think thats a reasonable figure.
The gun was broken down into six shaders. After noting the texture specs of similar guns from other artists I decided the main gun would have a 4096 texture. The Eotech sight,muzzle and foregrip a 2048 (I needed the higher res for the fine details and decals).A 1024 for the front/rear sights and rail guard.A 1024 for the bullet.A 512 for the glass and a 512 for the glowing reticle (a bit overkill!)
UVing
My biggest mistake with this project was the uving. I wasn't aggressive enough (and ended up being too aggressive). I mirrored and duplicated and offset as usual but the resolution was too low in Substance Painter after baking. So I scrapped them and started again. I mirrored even more, duplicated and overlapped repeating parts of the gun and scaled down the darker barely seen areas eg inside drum magazine, inner barrel etc. I overlayed these uvs onto similar areas eg the front / back of the drum mag I reused for the interior as they were the same material/colour.
Though the resolution improved I had gone too far in some areas. Notably the helmet design on the Grip. I couldn't mirror it so I broke the uvs and put them somewhere else so I could mirror the rest of the Grip. I only really noticed the mistake when the mesh was too far down the line to correct it. Put it down to experience!
The baking was completed in Substance Painter and apart from playing around with the Frontal/Rear distances (at lower res!)it went quite smoothly.
TEXTURING
At this stage I didn't want an all black/grey gun and found the gold/black one a more pleasing colour scheme.
The gun is mainly metal so I usually found the appropriate material in SP's database and modified it to suit the look I wanted. I created a folder for each part eg Reciever_Gold and used the Color Id for the masks. Then I made subfolders eg Base metal, Top metal ,stains, dirt etc.
Within each were the materials with various generators like Mask Builder and Editor.Also used Smart masks / Filters sometimes and usually added a Paint mask ontop for final tweaks. Couldn't find a Carbon fibre material for the Stock Cover so made my own in Photoshop with a small tiling texture (colour/height and roughness variations)
Some Normal map details were created aswell eg the Eotech logo. Cropped and cleaned up from a reference image in Photoshop. Stamped the image using projection or stencil in the Normal channel only. Exported the normal map, re-imported / combined with the baked Normals.
The rest of the decals were done in a similar fashion.
model
Hi Guys,
I needed to try out a new boolean workflow and get to grips with Substance Painter properly. I felt a gun would be a good candidate for my portfolio as my old one was non-PBR and looked a bit obsolete!
I found a suitable candidate on Instagram. A customized AR15. I wasn't aiming to directly model this but use it as a springboard for the final model. At the texturing stage I found another AR15 and liked its Gold and Black colour scheme.
HIGHPOLY
For reference photos I traced the weapon manufactures mentioned in the Instagram post and found most of the gun parts and grabbed the highest resolution pics I could find. Some of them even had videos which helped a lot. A few key parts I could not get, notably the upper-reciever but found one similar. For some parts I chose more interesting shapes instead.
In 3dsmax I modelled each piece seperately using a good reference photo in the background. Usually I started with a box or a spline extrusion and modelled cutting pieces for boolean operations. Simpler parts were made with Subdiv / Opensubdiv techniques or even just basic box modelling.
I knew some parts would need Zbrush for the final stages. Either for simple edge polishing like on the Sight but also for tricky places like on the Drum magazine. Zbrushes boolean ops were more suited.
The final hipoly a mix of 3dsmax and zbrush decimated meshes for baking.
LOWPOLY
Booleans shine here as I could dial down the subdivisions in cutting meshes and splines and end up with an almost finished lowpoly mesh. Some minor welding / merging and job done. The zbrush models were decimated then retop'd in 3dsmax. Sometimes some meshes were partly zbrush retopo partly 3dsmax boolean combined as one mesh eg Drum Magazine.
The final lowpoly I got down to 62k tris. Take into account the gun has approximately 200 + holes (mainly barrel/drum mag) and 40 bullets (each being 378 polys!) I think thats a reasonable figure.
The gun was broken down into six shaders. After noting the texture specs of similar guns from other artists I decided the main gun would have a 4096 texture. The Eotech sight,muzzle and foregrip a 2048 (I needed the higher res for the fine details and decals).A 1024 for the front/rear sights and rail guard.A 1024 for the bullet.A 512 for the glass and a 512 for the glowing reticle (a bit overkill!)
UVing
My biggest mistake with this project was the uving. I wasn't aggressive enough (and ended up being too aggressive). I mirrored and duplicated and offset as usual but the resolution was too low in Substance Painter after baking. So I scrapped them and started again. I mirrored even more, duplicated and overlapped repeating parts of the gun and scaled down the darker barely seen areas eg inside drum magazine, inner barrel etc. I overlayed these uvs onto similar areas eg the front / back of the drum mag I reused for the interior as they were the same material/colour.
Though the resolution improved I had gone too far in some areas. Notably the helmet design on the Grip. I couldn't mirror it so I broke the uvs and put them somewhere else so I could mirror the rest of the Grip. I only really noticed the mistake when the mesh was too far down the line to correct it. Put it down to experience!
The baking was completed in Substance Painter and apart from playing around with the Frontal/Rear distances (at lower res!)it went quite smoothly.
TEXTURING
At this stage I didn't want an all black/grey gun and found the gold/black one a more pleasing colour scheme.
The gun is mainly metal so I usually found the appropriate material in SP's database and modified it to suit the look I wanted. I created a folder for each part eg Reciever_Gold and used the Color Id for the masks. Then I made subfolders eg Base metal, Top metal ,stains, dirt etc.
Within each were the materials with various generators like Mask Builder and Editor.Also used Smart masks / Filters sometimes and usually added a Paint mask ontop for final tweaks. Couldn't find a Carbon fibre material for the Stock Cover so made my own in Photoshop with a small tiling texture (colour/height and roughness variations)
Some Normal map details were created aswell eg the Eotech logo. Cropped and cleaned up from a reference image in Photoshop. Stamped the image using projection or stencil in the Normal channel only. Exported the normal map, re-imported / combined with the baked Normals.
The rest of the decals were done in a similar fashion.
model
Replies
Some quick crits: The EXPS3 model looks pretty accurate, but the materials not so much. The outer shell is aluminium (IIRC) with some coating, while the actual holosight shell is plastic. In yours they both appear to be metal. Another thing to remember is that if you're going to include fingerprints, they need to be scaled correctly. From the pics I see (on the eotech and rear post) fingerprints that look child-sized, even if they're only partial prints.
I would go down with the Wear and make it less shiny and gloss.
But model is great.
Would loved to see a little bit more thought into the masking. The chipping of the paint seems as though the whole gun has suffered damaging, even on areas that are not as likely to get damaged.
I would agree with the above posts that there's some wear and tear in places that shouldn't have them. Other than that I think it is lovely!
This weapon deserves a follow