Old West style pistol

Hollowmind

I didn't do the model. I just did the textures to get some practice and to do something new. This is my first attempt at skinning a weapon, painting metal, and using bump and spec maps. Thought I'd post it here and get some crits on it.

No lights, 100% self-illumination


1 spot 2 omnis, 0% illumination (I'm very noobish with lighting so please feel free to crit that too, hehe):


Here are the flats:
Diffuse
Bump
Spec

So give me some crits. I'm always looking to improve.

Steakhouse

Looks pretty authentic but I've not gone out of my way to cross check any reference. My first thought was "damn that thing is filthy", but I suppose that's ok if the thing has seen a lot of unforgiving use and little maintenance. I would suggest though that if you wish to keep it with a worn look think of adding in so sharper wear mark along the harsher edges. Some cleaner chips and abrasions along the edges of the cylinder would be a good place too start, and maybe some residual gunpowder toward the front of the barrel (careful with that though it can be overdone). Finally you might want to think about adding an indent behind the hammer so it has someplace to bend back into, I'm pretty certain that some sort of slot or fixture would be there. That of course means reference images.

FatAssasin

You have to think of the spec map differently than the diffuse. Right now, it looks like it's just an adjusted greyscale version of the color map. The spec map is used to determine the brightness of the specular highlight if there happens to be one. So you wouldn't want to have painted in highlights like on the barrel where it goes from dark, to light, and dark again. It would all be the same brightness. The reason for using the spec map then, would be to darken areas where you woulndn't want it to be as bright, like worn areas or flecks/dents in the metal. I hope that makes sense.

Same goes for the bump map. Take out the painted lighting on the round parts. If you have a seperate dirt/scratch layer in your Photoshop file (if that's what you used), it would be an ideal place to start for your spec or bump map.

Hollowmind

Alrighty then. Thanks for the tips.

Dhin

You've modeled a Colt SAA's (Single Action Army,) it's Cavalry Model (7.5 inch long barel) but it's missing the loading port on the right side and needs the colt insigna on the top sides of the handle. (Only people really into the gun will notice that though.) Also the fin on the bottom is mainly hollywood. The Colt and S&W's didn't have that in reality.



It looks good.

[Deleted User]

What engine is it intended for? The way the spec maps are handled depends largely on that. When doing them for Doom 3, for instance, it's different from the way it's normally done for regular pre-rendered hi-poly stuff. The shape of the highlights can be painted into the spec maps to simulate the effect of the light shifting realistically on a more complex surface than there actually is. When it's done with regular shades of solid gray, it'll usually just over-illuminate those areas, resulting in large areas of nothing but the equivalent brightness of what a regular specular highlight would be. So the shapes of the highlights are painted on to compensate for the lack of control over the tightness of the highlight area. They don't paint the highlights into the diffuse maps then though, because they'll be handled by the spec maps. That's just Doom 3 though. I don't know which other engines do it that way. But I assume there are others.

You wouldn't generally want those highlights to appear on the bump map though, because it would just give those areas a raised appearance and the shadows would look like they lower inward. Generally, you'd want the bump maps to be mostly neutral gray, and then only lighten it where you want there to appear to be raised areas, and darken it where you want it to have indentations. So you paint on the deep scratches or raised bumps, but not any actual shading. The shading is already taken care of with the other texture images.

Those things aside, the painting technique on the texture looks really nice, IMO.

cspgames

Looks nice. The wooden grip maybe needs some work. And probably you should use a reflection map, cubemapping or spheremapping, if that's possible in the enviroment you want to use it.

But isn't that rather a revolver than a pistol?

Hollowmind

Played around with the textures a bit more. Took a lot of the highlights out of the diffuse, messed with the bump and spec maps a lot, put the spec map in the correct place, hehe. Had it in the wrong slot for the original pics so it wasn't doing much of anything in those. :P I updated all the jpg's of all the maps so you can check those out again at the links above.



As for the engine, this is for an old west style HL2 mod. I agreed to help out a friend with it. I really don't know what the engine requires and what it's capable of. But just in-case I wanted to get some practice in with spec and bump maps (eventually I'll try my hand at normal mapping as well). Once the model's in-game I'll tweak things as needed to get it looking right. I'm just practicing and broadening my horizons and learning.

As for what type of gun it is, yeah I suppose it is a revolver, not a pistol. But I know practically nothing about guns except point the barrel at what you want to kill and pull the trigger. All I know is they gave me the model and a few ref pics and I just ran with it.