NAC-22 SMG

Lt_Commander

Hello polycount!

I've been working on a gun in my free time and I feel it's got enough momentum to finish. 


I want it to have the styling of the guns from Robo Recall, I'm taking some detailing inspiration from Escape from Tarkov, and I'm using some scrapped silhouettes of the NAC-11 in Due Process for the base design.

I also want to model this to TurboSquid's new StemCell spec - mostly, I want to be able to have more then an academic understanding of the docs when I help out other artists.

Concepts:

(Thumbnail silhouettes by Jesse Russell-Klarich)


Silhouette and (nasty) concept paintover:



9-MAR


Blockout

17-MAR


Modeling

12-APR


17-APR


19-APR




Alright, that's where I'm at! I'm going to try and finish and post work in progress here!

C&C is greatly appreciated! I'm still at a point where things are somewhat fluid, and I'd love to get feedback to improve it!

Lt_Commander

Just about wrapping up the mesh. I applied some weighted normals, and it looks pretty decent without any turbosmooth or bakes. It weighs in at about 75k tris.

Lt_Commander

UVs are done! I'm breaking it down to 5 sheets - exterior, interior, magazine, compensator, and handle.

The main body will be baked at 4k and the other maps will vary to match the relative texel density. I'm baking optimization into the maps - any face using the interior texture can be culled while still retaining all the geo needed for a standard set of FPS animations. 




The base gun without an interior and no attachments should just need the exterior, handle, and mag textures. Keeping the more modular pieces on a separate texture sheet may be a pain to bake and texture the first time, but if I want to do variant textures, it should save me time down the road.

Next up is high poly finishing and generating a low poly to bake to. I'm going to make sure the mid and low poly share UVs, so the difference between subdiv and game ready textures will only be in the normalmaps - one will have edges baked as is tradition, and the other will just have my floating geo and nDo details + whatever the material surface overlays bring to the party.

Lt_Commander

High poly, low poly and bake are done. Thank God for Toolbag 3 baking tools, this would have been a nightmare otherwise! 

High Poly:



And the baked Low Poly - 7,965 Verts / 14,968 Tris



Polycount was reduced from 75k to 15k post unwrap by supporting edge removal and edge collapse/triangulation with manual edge removal and cuts to break down resulting n-gons. Not the most exciting work, but it got done.



Next up is painting additional details not worth modeling into the normal before I start texturing. 

Kanni3d

Nice work - curious as to why you would explode when you mentioned you even used TB3 baker, which automatically matches by mesh name? Unless you're exploding to see your different elements I supposed.

Good work! I can still see some unseen optimization on your final low-res mesh, if you really want to cut down.

Lt_Commander

Thanks!

Yeah the exploded views I'm showing here are purely for QA purposes. It's hard to confirm if a bake was successful when everything is nested in other meshes and whatnot.

As for the polycount, I started with low hanging fruit and worked my way down until I hit 15k. There are still quite a few obvious edges I can collapse, but I feel it's current count is fine for the general target - most of the loops still there would have been a bit of a balancing act to remove and would produce some ugly tris. Once it's fully textured, I'm probably going to do a version with interior culling that's optimized for VR - the target there will be about 5k.

Lt_Commander

This project is slow going but I'm only spending a few hours a week on it. After working on post-bake texture prep, I've entered the first phase of texturing:



Everything is still very work in progress-y.

Lt_Commander

Another round of texture work - turns out my basecolor was out of whack because the main body material was imported with a grey tint from max!





Just having some fun with the outer compenasator - I'm liking the look of just the inner component much better, so I'm going to focus on presentation with that one and only have the outer one available as a bonus.

Lt_Commander

Took a break from the main texture to work on some of the scene elements for the final renders - here are a few of the supporting props:

Lt_Commander

I finished this guy up! Check it out here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/BWRD4



I also made a promo video in Marmoset:

https://youtu.be/9XnIoChX394

jaker3278

I was unsure at the start as to how successful the design was going to be , but looking at your final renderings i was wrong. The textures and the scene that you have built around it have sold the design to me. Bake looks good and so do textures. 

Lt_Commander

Thank you, I appreciate that! I always feel like I'm working against a skill deficit in my early pipeline (concept and modeling), but the only way to improve it is through continued practice. Sometimes it is nice to finish a project though!