So uh...

FurryZA

What would be considered the "Basics?" Heh... I'm completely stumped and want to be an artist that makes, rigs, and animates his own models some day. 

Hopefully and wishfully sooner than later. 

https://i.imgur.com/2ryKh3L.png

Brian "Panda" Choi

Are you tying to recreate that gun?

Basics could include:

Figure Drawing
Still Life Drawing
Observational drawing
Color Theory
Foundational Design

TheGabmeister

Too vague of a question for us to give an answer. "Basics" of what?

FurryZA

I am trying to make the gun, yes, but after a few retries I think I got it down a bit better.

I'm mostly trying to figure out what I should be doing because, although I kinda know how to make props I think I go at them a bit too unorthodox and end up making it more counter intuitive than i should be.


Also a small update.

Also I should pay attention to how forum text boxes work for future reference, sorry haha.


Edit:With a bit more tweaking I got to...

Brian "Panda" Choi

The circle bits don't need to be contiguous to the mesh.

You could just bake that into the normal map.

If it helps for the future or now, you don't need to box model an air tight mesh all the time.  Try building out forms with just planes to have an easier time of just focusing on the literal look of something before having to go in and connect everything.

FurryZA

Brian "Panda" Choi said:

The circle bits don't need to be contiguous to the mesh.

You could just bake that into the normal map.

If it helps for the future or now, you don't need to box model an air tight mesh all the time.  Try building out forms with just planes to have an easier time of just focusing on the literal look of something before having to go in and connect everything.

I don't know if I understand how to do that. If I made a plane I would be dragging vertices to their respective position

I'm not sure how I could make a cylindrical type of shape with a box without adding more lines really, maybe with an example of what you might mean?

Brian "Panda" Choi

Literally create the circle shapes as a separate mesh, and interstect that into the body of the gun mesh.

You can have geo intersect each other.  Meshes do NOT need to be all one thing.  Sometimes you can have separate floating elements.

Box modeling is modeling starting from a basic primitive, and extruding, moving verts, etc. from that base volume.  It's a description of a technique.

Yes, modeling just a bunch of planes would involve moving vertices still.  As most basic modeling operations do.  You just would not NEED to connect everything until your silhouette/major elements are set in.

FurryZA

Brian "Panda" Choi said:

Literally create the circle shapes as a separate mesh, and interstect that into the body of the gun mesh.

You can have geo intersect each other.  Meshes do NOT need to be all one thing.  Sometimes you can have separate floating elements.

Box modeling is modeling starting from a basic primitive, and extruding, moving verts, etc. from that base volume.  It's a description of a technique.

Yes, modeling just a bunch of planes would involve moving vertices still.  As most basic modeling operations do.  You just would not NEED to connect everything until your silhouette/major elements are set in.

So you're saying all the extruding parts could just be separate pieces put together? I could do that I think.. Connecting them would be the biggest issue though.

Ashervisalis

Honestly when you first start creating models, you should spend a good while just following tutorials online. If you're aiming for games, spend time watching tutorials which take props from beginning to final product. You'll want to learn Maya and Substance Painter for this pipeline. Good luck

Taylor Brown

@FurryZA it took me a while to understand that meshes can be separated and intersecting with no issues. I prepared an example that hopefully illustrates it -
So this is a model I worked on a couple months ago.

This is the same model but with each separate element given a different color. You can see that some parts are all one piece (so one color) while other parts that in real life would be one piece have multiple pieces that are just intersecting.


If you can find a nice model of a gun somewhere online and get it in your modeling package, I think you'd really benefit from seeing how quite often a bunch of little broken apart pieces tend to make the whole.