PC-CSGO | AK47 TRI-REX (WIP)

Likon

Hello everyone.
I've been a long time lurker at polycount (mainly at the awesome WAYWO thread) but never decided to sign up since I don't have much to show for myself. However with this contest I decided to give it a try, though I'm guessing I'm probably just one of many 

I am already more than halfway through (hopefully) but I'll try to compensate with a step by step of the process.

Current Progress

and the new m4


References
The main reference that jumpstarted the idea was this tattoo:



then the rest came from a handy tutorial on how to make a mesh in PS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSAGUhzA-90
 
and the overall saturated colors come from the sci-fi art style of that time.

Progress

I thought of making some dinosaur or dragon in low poly style, so I started with a TRex and ended up with a sort of dragon. Since my handpainting skills are dreadful I just heavily edited a TRex photo to get my model to make the mesh. Take a look at this funky fella...




Decided to also make him chase a bird in order to add some more substance to the skin.
And so I got this:



Then added some details and colors to bring out the shape of the weapon a bit more bringing it to the current state:




For now I'm just getting it into the actual texture map. Hopefully I'll be back soon with a 3D version.

I'm not professional at this stuff so any inputs or critiques you can provide are appreciated

Edit:
Now that I took the time to make things more presentable (and research again for the images since I didn't download them) I'm adding here an image with some more references that I did not post earlier.

Likon

Finally getting it into 3D, its not been easy to project the texture into the mesh though. I'm using photoshop to do so but photoshop lacks some advanced settings like hitting all faces instead of just stopping on the first hit. Also I'm having to manually correct all the 'vertical' faces so its taking some time...

Anyway, here is the result so far:



Now still need to correct some of the projected faces and create a decent alpha channel to make the edges of the triangles shine and stand out more in game.

Likon

Pretty much done. Been testing with the alpha channel to control the exposure trying to give a nice effect on the triangles. Here are the results:

The exposure in action:

And finally in game:

WolfSovereign

Looks great imo, but no matter how heavily you edited that pic, its a violation of rules. Still a nice skin tho. If your handrawing skills are bad, why not use this contest as a motivation to improve them

Likon

WolfSovereign said:

Looks great imo, but no matter how heavily you edited that pic, its a violation of rules. Still a nice skin tho. If your handrawing skills are bad, why not use this contest as a motivation to improve them

Sorry Wolfsovereign but how come is this a violation of the rules? I only used an image of a TRex as a reference to make my 'guiding sketch' so I could then make my own triangulation, all manually. How different would it be if I used it as a reference to make a handpainted version and then triangulate?

As for the reason why I didn't use the opportunity to handpaint it is because the main idea behind this skin was to present a triangulated mesh, so I focused my efforts on the creation of the mesh instead of on the reference for the mesh. The reference was just a mean to help me create my mesh so I never thought this would constitute any problem (and actually I still doubt it does).
Anyway thank you for the input. Hopefully this will not be a problem.

Likon

I'm pretty much done, after some more tweaks to the alpha channel here is the final result in game. I'm very happy with the effect I was able to achieve with the dynamic reflections, the Source engine really surprised me.



Since I still had a few days till the end of the contest I decided to also make an M4 version. This time I was much quicker since I still had everything layered up and had already learned the projection process.



I'll soon update this thread with the submissions links as soon as I upload them to the workshop.

Likon

Here are the submissions, click the images to go to the workshop.
Edit: or maybe not, for some reason after refresh the links are swapped by the links to the image, so here we go in a more traditional way...

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=692011148


 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=692028717