Help with weapon modeling?

MrCreamy

I'm a relative novice looking to build up my modeling skills by making some firearms. I decided to start with a Desert Eagle because
A: I thought a handgun would be relatively simple to start with while still maintaining some interesting forms to work on, and
B: the more recent Desert Eagle models have a picatinny rail which I thought would provide a good reference for scale since it's universal in size, or so I've been led to believe.

I went ahead in modeling the rail from specified dimensions, but when trying to align my mesh to any reference I've found, I can't quite get it to match up.

Can anyone with experience in modeling real weapons chime in and tell me if there is in fact some variance in this feature?
I'm also totally open to suggestions as to better ways to approach modeling this while maintaining accurate scale.

Pictured: My current picatinny rail modeled from reference

Kanni3d

Depends on your reference image, it'll likely always have perspective distortion, and not line up 100% correctly. Best thing for you to do is look up picatinny rail dimesions, keep accurate to that, and the rest should fall in place, since you can model other details relative to that.

Another quick tip is to model the bullet + barrel first, since those are also "universal", and easy to find dimensions for.

Look up the weapon itself, and you can easily find some width/height measurements on its wikipedia.

MrCreamy

Yeah, I've gathered a handful of different references. In particular I've found a few different photos of the .44 barrel on and off the gun. I tried taking a handful of them into Fspy to try and correct for focal length so that I could at least align my picatinny rail knowing it's accurate in size. But even after using a few different references and trying different focal lengths, none seem to quite match up to the form of my picatinny rail. It did occur to me to try modeling off of the bullet, but then, I'm not quite sure how exactly it fits into the barrel with regards to scale. Not exactly common to find a photo of a round chambered into the barrel where you can still see both the barrel and bullet.

sacboi

"It did occur to me to try modeling off of the bullet, but then, I'm not quite sure how exactly it fits into the barrel with regards to scale. Not exactly common to find a photo of a round chambered into the barrel where you can still see both the barrel and bullet."

Dedicated technical sites or user forums usually swap around cutaways of their particular 'pistola' too one-up each other in technical smarts.

http://www.warriortalk.com/showthread.php?69971-Magnum-Research-Desert-Eagle/page4

Alex_J

The name of the bullet tells you the caliber, and sometimes the exact millimeter dimensions. 

Finding the exact barrel length of a gun is easy. 

Get serious, this is war. Some jackass out there is going to make a more accurate weapon model why you are making excuses.


1911 takes a :


and 4-5 inches is common barrel lengths.

poopipe

The bore is very slightly smaller than the bullet diameter so the rifling engages properly - that's likely to be manufacturer/weapon specific 

And then there's the tolerance variation between individual weapons..

It's endles..

Or you could just wing it a bit since nobody is ever going to know 

Thanez

The picatinny rail dimensions can be relied upon. You can also usually find dimensions on the ammunition, barrel, slide length, total length, total height. Then you can model in some placeholder boxes to hold those dimensions for you. That should help place any refs you can use.

"The gun measures 10.75” in length with a 6” barrel, or 14.75” in a 10” barrel available in black as an aftermarket item.
Width is 1.25”, height 6.25” and the weight with an empty magazine is approximately 72 ounces.
It has a trigger reach of 2.75” and a
sight radius of 8.5” with the 6” barrel."