PC-CSGO | [UNTITLED 1] | AK-47/M4A4 (WIP)
Intro:
Well hello there, thank you for taking your time to take a look at my weapon design post. I would first like to say a huge thank you to Valve and Polycount for creating such an awesome competition and opportunity. And I am still quite new to the Polycount website, but I must say that the community and content on here is awesome! Keep it up guys! Now that that is out of the way, time to show off my (hopefully not horrible) design! Oh and, I love criticism, as it shows where I can improve my design!
Day 1:
First of I want to let of my frustration that I had for around 4 days, as I had 'technical' difficulties with 3D-Coat's projection painting before today. I had major issues with the way the image would be distorted on to the weapon's mesh and UVs. Thankfully, Coridium (creator of the Asiimov skin series), uploaded an awesome new tutorial about how to do projection painting in my favorite 3D software, Blender. Now why am I telling you all this, well because I kinda wanted to start this project/design quite a bit earlier, and maybe someone who is reading this is in a similar situation, so here is the link to his tutorial in case anyone is interested.
Now to the good bit, the designing process! So I did some research around the internet and found quite a few inspirational artworks/images, which I decided to combine into a mood board, as you can see here:
Now I am aware that not all of it is from the 70s/80s, but its not reflecting my final design in anyway. Its is just a way to not be distracted by other things and focus on the design. So I began to draw some extremely drafty ideas, most of them are really just pointless, but at least I was trying!
And while I was browsing and drawing, I came across some graffiti artwork and began searching a bit more into graffiti as I thought it would be a cool addition to the game as I am unaware of any graffiti style skins. And since graffiti had a major uprising during the 70s/80s but I wanted to mix it in with a bit of 'Sci-Finess', as the competition's theme is: 70s 80s Sci Fi. So I began searching on the internet to find some interesting graffiti styles and found an awesome artist known as Daim. Here is an example of his artwork:
After having seen his designs, I was hugely inspired and knew what I wanted to create, so I began trying to sketch his 'style' but also try and create something original at the same time. Here is the result:
Here was when I finally began deciding which weapon to put this design on. I came to the decision that the AK-47 was best fit, as it was to be a Covert Grade, which are normally very colorful. And/or a M4A4, as it is a Classified Grade skin.
Replies
DAY 2:
Today I managed to create another (more detailed) draft of the weapon.Unfortunately that is all I was able to do today, but I already began working on a larger and more detailed version of this and also will begin planning the design onto the weapons, AK-47 and M4A4.
Day 3:
So today, I made some progress with how I am actually going to design this 'virtually'. Either I will design all of it in Blender (3D approach) or draw a detailed version on paper and vectorize it. Most likely I will do the Blender one, as I am more comfortable (and better) with it. Also here are some draft weapon designs.And a WIP screenshot of the Blender file:
Hopefully there will be more progress to share with everyone. Oh and at the moment, this is being designed for the AK-47, then after the M4A4.
Day 4:
Today I was mainly working on the idea in Blender, not much visual progress has been made:Now comes the point when I realize that I should first try to vectorize my second draft (this one if you forgot it...)
So here is my progress on that:
Hopefully this will turn out well and look good on the weapon!
Day 5:
Today I tried to finish of the vectorizing part and tried to position the design onto the gun, but did not have much luck unfortunately.What the problem is, is that the weapon design needs to flow or feel as if it is a part of the weapon and not just 'dumped' onto the weapon, so what I will do is restart the draft design of the gun and vectorize that and then see how that looks. At least I have had some practice with vectorizing now. Hopefully I manage to finish this in time for the deadline.
Day 6-7:
So today, I decided to do both day 6 and 7 joined together as yesterday, I didn't get to do much except learning new techniques, researching ideas and looking at other people's submissions, to see how their submissions are coming along. So yesterday I decided to continue working on some ideas and I think I created an interesting design which might look good in the game, take a look!(P.S. The printer kinda jumped a bit)
Now I am aware that the design doesn't look very good at the moment, so that is why I created a digital draft as well as you can see here:
I think it looks much better then the previous draft but it is still missing some elements, for example the magazine and front part of the gun (not sure what its called...) has not much to it. So thats what I need to start working on as well.