Missile Launcher

Mario_Cerrito

Hi everyone, this is my first post here, nice to meet you.
I've moved recently to low-poly and realtime modeling, and started to learn a bit Unreal Engine, so I'd like some feedback about my works.
This is my first experiment, it's a missile launcher, I've tried to keep the polycount low(about 3k triangles), can someone tell what can I improve, and what should I change or do better? Is the polycount ok? or should I've used less/more poligons?
Some critiques would be really appreciated, thanks a lot.

model

JLeeD

This is looking awesome man! I love the clean shape and silhouette, the design is super nice (though it does seem more like an assault rifle than a missile launcher XD). I'm not a hard surface guy but your polys are looking pretty good to me. I would be careful with consistency in the future, its a small nit picky thing but the purple vent things, I don't know why you bothered to model in the cavity of the vent when right next to it you have a silver vent that's only texture and normal, no geo detail. If you feel like the purple vents needed geo, I would have given the silver vent next to it supporting geo as well.
As a general rule I would set a standards bar when looking at a guide to polycount and texture sizes. The first question you wanna ask is, is this weapon for a first person or third person game? How is the player going to view this weapon? 
Next I would choose a game/studio that you should model this in the style of. This is to keep you focused. Right now your gun has a lack of direction, would this be for an Epic Games project like unreal tournament or paragon? Or a game like borderlands? If you get a focus on direction and inspiration and do a little research, you'll figure out your polycount and texture sixes from the game you're looking to copy.
Say if you wanted to take this to the level of Unreal Tournament, you're gonna want to upres this and get those colours really punching.


Looking at how other studios model their guns ect will give you a really good instinct on how to optimise and where not to compromise polys. There are some mega lush weapon artists on polycount aswell, if you seek those guys out and check out their threads.
Overall nice work tho! Keep pushing it

Mario_Cerrito

Thank you for your comment JLeeD, you're right when you say my model has a lack of direction probably, since it was my first low-poly model I was more focused on trying to keep the original shape as mush as possible, with the lowest amount of triangles, so I did more a general purpose model than a specific model for a type of game, probably it would have been better if I did 2 or 3 LOD, one with higher polycount, and one lower.
Those silver things on the side are not actually vents, but it's more an underlying structure to make the inside more flexible so that the gun can stand the missile explosion when someone shoot, probably they don't sell that idea too much.
That gun you posted has an incredible amount of polygons and detail, is it really low-poly? That's quite impressive, probably in fps you can really bump the polycount on weapons quite a lot.
Thanks a lot for the advices, I'll keep them in mind for my next models.