Texturing feedback - AKM

akshattejas

Hie!!,
Am trying to texture this handuard for my akm, and i would love to get some feedback on them, as idk it just doesn't feel 'quite there' yet. its an older variant so am trying to sell that military wear and tear.

also would love any substance tips 

sacboi

By "military wear and tear" assume means throughout its service life? Because at the moment as someone that had trained for years with similar grade ordnance + manufactured using the same materials which from my experience, can't recall seeing anything close to the level of damage applied, especially to those metal components on the receiver assembly, as well. 

To start with, I'd recommend more research e.g  processes how these weapons were made - their materials - environments where deployed and primarily routine maintenance either in the field or otherwise.      

poopipe

That  sort of research/thinking is key to getting a believable look. 
if this is an 'in service' weapon for an actual military I don't think it would be allowed to get into this state - you'd revarnish or replace parts before it happened and I'm positive you wouldn't let anything get rusty (rusty bits stop gun shooting).  If we're talking about some sort of scrappy insurgents that scavenged the equipment and hide it in the woods that's a different matter entirely though. 

Agree with Sacboi on the metals - spend a bit of time watching forgotten weapons videos on AK derivatives and you'll learn all sorts of stuff about how they were made and get some insights onto what flaws there are in the design - this is all food for decision making when trying to represent the materials. 

The below picture is an ak74 I googled in what I would assume is acceptable condition for military use.  
I've called out some of the interesting wear and importantly the materials it's made of which have a significant effect on how wear patterns develop
These things are painted, not blued/parkerised/whatever which is important.
The receiver is primarly made of thin, cheap stamped steel which is pretty soft - it will take scratches pretty readily but tend to lose paint less easily than harder surfaces
The harder  steels used for rivets/charging rod and trunion will scratch much less easily and as you can see the paint will tend to wear or flake off long before any change happens to the underlying surface

it's interesting to see how crude the surface machining is on the harder parts and that they simply painted over it 





On a positive note the varnish wear effect on your lower handguard wood looks really nice - if that amount of wear was allowed to happen I'd expect the underlying wood to have gotten dirty/greasy and be a darker tone and i feel like the wear in the middle (hand holdy bit) is overdone but you've done a great  job on the transition between materials.

akshattejas

sacboi said:

By "military wear and tear" assume means throughout its service life? Because at the moment as someone that had trained for years with similar grade ordnance + manufactured using the same materials which from my experience, can't recall seeing anything close to the level of damage applied, especially to those metal components on the receiver assembly, as well. 

To start with, I'd recommend more research e.g  processes how these weapons were made - their materials - environments where deployed and primarily routine maintenance either in the field or otherwise.      

poopipe said:

That  sort of research/thinking is key to getting a believable look. 
if this is an 'in service' weapon for an actual military I don't think it would be allowed to get into this state - you'd revarnish or replace parts before it happened and I'm positive you wouldn't let anything get rusty (rusty bits stop gun shooting).  If we're talking about some sort of scrappy insurgents that scavenged the equipment and hide it in the woods that's a different matter entirely though. 

Agree with Sacboi on the metals - spend a bit of time watching forgotten weapons videos on AK derivatives and you'll learn all sorts of stuff about how they were made and get some insights onto what flaws there are in the design - this is all food for decision making when trying to represent the materials. 

The below picture is an ak74 I googled in what I would assume is acceptable condition for military use.  
I've called out some of the interesting wear and importantly the materials it's made of which have a significant effect on how wear patterns develop
These things are painted, not blued/parkerised/whatever which is important.
The receiver is primarly made of thin, cheap stamped steel which is pretty soft - it will take scratches pretty readily but tend to lose paint less easily than harder surfaces
The harder  steels used for rivets/charging rod and trunion will scratch much less easily and as you can see the paint will tend to wear or flake off long before any change happens to the underlying surface

it's interesting to see how crude the surface machining is on the harder parts and that they simply painted over it 





On a positive note the varnish wear effect on your lower handguard wood looks really nice - if that amount of wear was allowed to happen I'd expect the underlying wood to have gotten dirty/greasy and be a darker tone and i feel like the wear in the middle (hand holdy bit) is overdone but you've done a great  job on the transition between materials.

hiee, thanku so much for these very insightful and detailed feedbacks!!, i just used parkerised steel for the entire gun but now i think am understanding the importance of material separation, even if it looks kinda same at the surface,

also about the story, so this is supposed to be a vigilante's weapon, in this alternate universe that am making, basically a mechanical rifle that is immune to ai and viruses used as a resistance against corrupt govts,  passed on from generation to generation, something that would be found with someone in an organisation like the taliban, like seized weapons after the soviets left, 

this is the kind of maintenance that I am going after ... 


That being said, the thing u said about rust makes so much sense and i will definitely polish those parts more

poopipe

If that's what you're aiming for then I think you've mostly nailed the wood. 

I'm fairly confident in saying that an AKM would be painted - I think only the milled receiver guns would have been blued .  You should double check that though cos I'm also confident in saying that the various soviet aligned states that produced AKs all produced them differently.