'Elysium' AKM

musashidan

EDIT: dumping the rest of the renders here. Calling this one finished.....

Yes, yes, I know.... AKM has been done to death, and probably the Elysium mod as well, but I love the weapon.  

This has been festering in my unfinished projects folder, guiltily, for too long. Finally decided to unwrap/bake it down. Will eventually get it into Painter as soon as time allows.

apollo580

This looks great!

I love the details you have everywhere! Hopefully we can see a textured version of this

musashidan

Cheers mate. Definitely will be texturing this. Just a matter of finding the time.

Zi0

Nice work my only feedback would be that the eotech looks a bit too small.

musashidan

Zi0 said:

Nice work my only feedback would be that the eotech looks a bit too small.

Cheers man. I agree. I've tweak-scaled it a few times already and this is just the feedback I needed to do so again.

musashidan

Finally got around to texturing this in Substance Painter. Blockout and next 2 passes done. Currently on the last polishing pass. Will post up parts as I finish them and maybe a breakdown later if anyone's interested. Crits very welcome as I'll be handing the asset off for use in a marketing spot very soon.

Rear attachment

Base colour

musashidan

Low-Poly in all it's ugly glory.... plus on-card vert-count in Toolbag

musashidan

Rubber custom pistol grip look-dev

musashidan

musashidan

Explosive Ammo

Alex_J

fantastic attention to detail. like the trigger guard being inset into the pistol grip.

kind of hard to tell from the angle of that first photo, but with the taped-together magazines there does need to be enough space between to clear the side of the magazine well. Otherwise the magazines need to face opposite directions -- you'd flip it over then rock it in. probably you already know this but just in case...

musashidan

Cheers mate. I don't have the military experience you have. I was just following refs from the film. My firearm experience solely resides in the computer.

Custom stock:

musashidan

Look-Dev render. Still not happy with a lot of the roughness values.

Zi0

Coming along nicely! Maybe adding some damage on the wood?

musashidan

Thanks man. Funny you should say that. Damaging the wood is next on my to-do list.

musashidan

Working on the wood damage. Was going to sculpt it in Zbrush and combine the normal map, but decided to just do it directly in Painter.

musashidan

At the look dev stage I'm constantly rendering under different lighting conditions and looking for areas to improve. I'll often just do a quick image like this to remind me to work on/polish those areas.

musashidan

Continuing to work on the wood damage. Also reworked the wood values as I wasn't happy with it. Going to call it finished as you just have to at some stage or you'll be infinitely tweaking. Substance Painter worked out great for the damage. Saves an extra step in Zbrush and saves sculpting details that the normal map might not pick up. doing the damage in SP gives 1:1 feedback right on the map.

Shrike

some of these edges are very sharp and will look poor from any normal distance if not close up, otherwise good progress

musashidan

@shrike cheers for the comment, mate. Nice to get one from you.

Mipp-mapping 101. Yeah, that was part of the design. This is purely a portfolio piece that I'm rendering offline so I was going for more of a real-world look rather than an in-game exaggerated bevel look as there'll be no mipping or LODing involved.

Shrike

For offline that makes sense, its not really a mip-mapping thing tho, mip mapping actually often helps by blurring and reducing the aliasing, its
rasterization, reducing the small details to only few pixels on screen, adding noise and or aliasing, good example is the fire selector



Try push your edge definition, it is kind of uniform right now, don't be afraid of adding some more large scale variation, right now its unnaturally consistent and its missing the real highlights (of course not a perfect/finished example, but you see the difference in contrast)

musashidan

@shrike thanks for the great crits. The large/small edgewear ratio is definitely something I always have in mind. I actually(just today) went back over the attachment component you did the paintover on and painted out a lot of the scratches as I thought it was just too much. I paint all my edgewear masks by hand as I don't like the results of Painter's mask generators so it's been a lot of work on this asset and your feedback is something I badly needed. You know what it's like when you've been staring at the same asset for way too long. I'll certainly revisit each component and redo some of the edgewear with your advice in mind.

Thanks for taking the time.

mike85

If I may put my 2 cents in? I really like the attention to the detail and the overall level is just magnificient. However, I think the handguard shape is somewhat off. It's like it's slightly misplaced and the top bit should be lower. Also the front metal thingey should be thinner than the lower one. Here's what it looks like on the original Soviet AKM:

Also note the wood itself, it is varnished (birch plywood to be exact), the color is closer to ginger, very smooth and glossy. That is, of course, if you want to recreate the exact Soviet one, ripped off copies from other countries may have had different style handguards.

I do realise that probably lots of people do not actually care about making a perfect copy and it will only be noticeable to a few experts maybe. I have only seen maybe a couple of AK models in my life that are 100% accurate and of course searching for references for old foreign weapons is hard and not always pays off. The choise is all yours, it looks perfect as is now and probably no one will notice that apart from a few other geeks

musashidan

@Eric Chadwick cheers for the front page Eric.

musashidan

The lazerscope. Still working on the edgewear. The endless painting of the edgewear......:)

musashidan

Probably going to call the texturing 99% complete at this stage. If I don't stop it'll go on forever. Have moved everything to Blender Cycles for final look dev rendering and lighting setup. Just got into Blender recently so this is my first time using it for any kind of rendering.

musashidan

@mike85 Sorry, just saw your post. Thanks for the kind words and the great critique. I gathered up dozens of ref for this weapon and I was totally surprised at just how many variations of this gun exist! In the end I just based the dimensions on one good side ref that I decided on and then just mixed and matched various design elements that I liked from different versions of the gun. Because it is hard to get exact dimensions when modeling 3D objects like this what I do is find out the barrel diameter in mm and work everything off that. When working from single side refs and lots of angle refs it's a given that we artists have to interpret as best we can. It's pretty much impossible to be 100% accurate without schematics, especially because all the photos we gather are at different camera settings and interpreting scale/dimensions/distance can be a case of just eyeballing most of the time.

musashidan

*dud post*

Alex_J

didn't realize this got finished. looks fucking amazing. details are spot on.

you didn't happen to record any of the texturing process at all did you? I'm going to have some weapon like this in my next project and would hope to hit a similar quality... even if you retroactively made a breakdown of the overall process, that'd be worth some money to me.

musashidan

@BIGTIMEMASTER Cheers mate. Appreciate it.

I'm afraid I didn't. I just don't have the time at the moment, but here's my Zbrushcentral top row thread from a few years back with a full breakdown, including a bit of Substance Painter. My number one tip is don't rely on the edgewear generators. They are a bit shit and everyone uses them almost default. All my edgewear masks are painted by hand. I have a few custom brushes I made and some scratch maps. The timber handguard damage on this weapon, for instance, is all painted directly onto the normal map by hand. It's almost like 'sculpting' in Painter.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?200015-WXS-07-Depopulator

Alex_J

That wood edge wear was one of the big things I was curious about. It looks chunky enough as if it were almost built into the geometry -- though I know it's not. You used a special normal map brush, or did that with height>convert to normal on export?

musashidan

The timber damage was just hand painted with the standard default brush on a height layer. Nothing special. Any height/normal details you paint are automatically comped onto your final exported normal map. You can view the map when you press C to cycle through your channels: normal + height. 

melviso

musashidan said:

@BIGTIMEMASTER Cheers mate. Appreciate it.

I'm afraid I didn't. I just don't have the time at the moment, but here's my Zbrushcentral top row thread from a few years back with a full breakdown, including a bit of Substance Painter. My number one tip is don't rely on the edgewear generators. They are a bit shit and everyone uses them almost default. All my edgewear masks are painted by hand. I have a few custom brushes I made and some scratch maps. The timber handguard damage on this weapon, for instance, is all painted directly onto the normal map by hand. It's almost like 'sculpting' in Painter.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?200015-WXS-07-Depopulator

Yep, I have always had this problem with procedural texturing. They can never be as correct as if u would paint it by hand. Especially if u are using references. But I get where time is a factor, it works wonders.