[WIP] Samurai matchlock gun

plord

Hello Polycount!
So, long story short - I wanted to learn ZBrush for a long time as my support tool for hard surface modeling (for making details etc). I have found pictures of really beautifully crafted Japanese matchlock (Tanageshima) and I thought it will be a great exercise to create it with help of ZBrush.
For start, I gathered as much reference as I could and assumed to not create it as clean as it is on them, wanted by the way to learn how to create more used, less factory-crafted details/meshes/materials. 

So after few weeks of learning, sculpting, creating and deleting stuff, I get to the point where I can start making lowpoly of it.


And here I want to ask more experienced players in this topic about some critique, what can be done better, what is bad?
The target is to create low poly- game ready mesh, though that I will create more material-specific details later in Painter.

plord

Update! Retopo progress. Most done by hand, only for wire, I used Zbrush zremesher (just as a test, never used it before and it worked well for me ) and for the end of the barrel, I've frozen the subd level 1. It's a bit heavy and has a lot of unnecessary edges but I like to have more geometry and clean it later.


I was a little worried about ornaments - how they will bake so I unwrapped automatically smaller one, created cage and baked it down, think it looks alright  

It still is a big experiment/learning project for me so any comments and crits would be much appreciated

Elithenia

nice one!!

plord

Update! More low poly parts, especially cover for gunpowder. Also I've done fast uv'd, baking and texturing of the ornament part - just to try how it will look. Note to myself: will need to better define the higher parts of the ornaments, or create better contrast on them

Thanks @Elithenia !


think that the smaller one looks cool but the other one has some pather that are hard to read - will need more contrast here

plord

Update! Retopology done!, finished the 'dragon' part and with that the whole retopo, I did a little bit cleaning, currently I have around 25k tris. Now UV-time!  

plord

Update! Uv done right, bake also so I'm into some texturing time! Did simple material layout, found some wrong parts and I had to rebake them :< Tomorrow I will start texturing with full force! 

Larry

Are these sculpted ornaments made by hand or a stencil/lightbox? I have trouble making clean shapes when sculpting, even with a lazy mouse

plord

@Larry
For the smaller one, I've created a mask in photoshop with focus on having only black and white values then I used it as a stencil. This way I have the shapes that I want to refine with hand-sculpting. 
I learned a lot from here: https://youtu.be/RByXIvjcS7U
The Bigger ornament was a mix of my weird ideas how to create it. In the end, it worked well but I think smaller is much more well defined and the process of creating is simpler. Maybe its the result of my learning. Dunno.

joshmtyler

These sculpts are absolutely fantastic. Only crit I have right now is that the wood texture still feels a little flat. I feel like it needs some subtle edge wear/highlights.

plord

Hey @joshmtyler
thanks for critique man! Yeah, I just lay there some materials as a starting point. Now I added some more details and wear so any more thoughts how to improve it will be much appreciated 

Update! Think I will finish it at this point (maaybe), I worked more on materials' details, also tried to add some fibers sticking out of the cord (plane with 256 texture), but they are barely visible, not sure how to approach them, maybe add more of them? Opened the box for gunpowder I think later in presentation it will be nice to see it has some movable parts   Maybe I will create a simple animation of the mechanism (ultra simple animation :x) with 'BANG!" flag
I will try marmoset for presentations shots.

plord

So, its finally done (as if any art can be considered 'done' :d) Finally I've used Substance Painter Iray for rendering. Tried toolbag but could achieve that cool results I was looking for, maybe too many options I've learned a lot, mostly Zbrush which was the main aim of this project and I'm super happy with result and knowledge that I've acquired  
As always I'm looking for critique to improve so feel free to comment it event its done  

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3z3kY

joshmtyler

This is fantastic. It definitely looks like you've put a lot of love into it. The small details are intriguing as hell!

There's something weird going on right here on the top of the wood close to the barrel where it gets dark like it's got a carved lip or something. But it's small and I don't think you need to worry about it.

Kanni3d

Beautiful colors and rendering! To nitpick, seems you've got a lot of unneeded loops for the long wooden part running along the barrel, and even the inside of the muzzle.

plord

@joshmtylerThanks You! I think I know what You mean, checked it in painter and looks like one brush stroke too far  

@Kanni3d Thanks man! yeah, I liked saturated colors on this one, think it does well to the overall look. You are 100% right with these loops, too far from the player camera, back then they seemed necessary