WIP M4A1 - Substance Painter

Necromonza

Good day,

I've been going back and forth on this project trying to get the best shaders I can. A few notes on this project:
 - Highpoly to lowpoly methord, baked in substance painter
 - On this particular pass I've baked with the lowpoly with only one smoothing group, this really helped with no seams where the different smoothing groups would be. However this did send my normal a little haywire making some of the artifacts you see there in the normal and curvature. 
 - The Auto, Semi, Safe, and logo normals are inverted. This will be fixed.
 - The logo (Eagle) will be changed later to something a bit more complex.

I'm going for a very clean new look on this weapon.
I'm battling with the plastic material on the grip and stock. Its supposed to be darker than the metal but due to the reflectivity it always looks so much brighter and just looks wrong.

Please let me know what you think.
 

Cglewis

Great start!
One note on your modeling....the whole weapon feels long.....i was looking at M4A1s on google i noticed that none of them have the stock extended as far as you do.

I feel right now the texture is a bit boring we have the same color/material on a lot of the components I would say experiment with different colors/materials on pieces like this image below note how the upper receiver is a different color/material 

I also noticed a lot of the magazines appeared to be made of a different metal than the actual gun.

Did you make the material in substance designer or are you using the default gun metal material? 

Necromonza

Hi, Thanks for your fast reply.

To address the modeling. The way I set up the model I'll be able to extend and retract the stock as needed in marmoset. 

I agree the texture is boring so I will spice it up with some variation. For now I want to keep the upper receiver and lower the same material but but I will do multiple renders with different paint jobs so that's definitely in the plan.

You're right about the magazine, its a lot lighter I wonder what material that is. I will try recreate this. 

No, this was built from scratch. I prefer not to use the default materials.  

Necromonza

I really like the white sticker or paint on the top of the mag from that ref you sent. 

Alex_J

Most of those STANAG magazines are made from aluminum. You don't have to guess or wonder, just look it up. All the information is easily and freely available. Especially with guns. Gun people love talking shop. They love specifications and details. If you want to know the circumference of the firing pin of some obscure swedish rifle from WW1, you can find that information.

Butt stock extension is user preference. That particular style of buttstock has three points at which it can be locked. Fully in, halfway out, and all the way out. 


I wouldn't try to get your materials looking right in substance painter. Make sure they are looking right in your final render engine. Whether thats marmoset or a game engine or whatever, it will look pretty different from iray, due to the difference in lighting environments.