My Models (Guns)

itsover3

I just started modeling and ive made a few guns so far, Beretta, Deagle, and MAC 10 R/C plz none are skinned considering i dont know how to do any of that. I am only 12 so my work isnt gonna be amazing but any tips etc. would be greatly appreciated

Beretta:







Mac 10:







Currently Working on:

<font color="green"> Kimber </font>

Flewda

Hmmmm,

There are a lot of problems i see with the models. For starters you got some really poorly modeled geometry. I really don't quite know how to explain everything. I would study some other gun wireframes (i'm sure you can find many good examples on this forum) and see how their wireframe looks. There are a lot of lines that should be straight that on your mesh are crooked (the eject port on the Mac-10 for example). And I am not sure what that cylinder is right behind the eject port on the mac-10, but that is definitely not perfectly round. It looks like you put a noise modifier on a cylinder. Also, on the wire stock of the Mac-10, on the curved area, you should take those edge loops, and rotate them a bit to fit the curve a bit better.
You also have some crazy n-gons going on. The side of the desert eagle is almost painful to look at. It looks like you just used a spline to outline the shape of the deagle, then extruded it, but never bothered to connect those verts to another vert. In turn, you get a 50+ sided polygon (or whatever). While it's true that engines now will automatically connect those verts (triangulate them) you smoothing on it will be whacked, and it makes unwrapping a pain.
And lastly, you have a TON of detail in some places, and little detail in others. Try to get the whole model blocked in evenly (not going crazy on detail) first and make sure the base rough of the gun is solid, then go in with the details. I know sometimes its easy to get carried away, but this is a good thing to practice imo.
The before mentioned are just a few things i noticed that seem technically wrong, and they are pretty consistent with all the guns above.

I would also suggest really studying how guns are designed and how they function. For example, the back of your beretta, and desrt eagle, you have the hammer. However, the hammer is just going straight into the back of the slide (there is no groove cut out for the hammer to sit in). This cut out of the back of the slide allows the hammer to make contact with the firing pin, which will ignite the bullet (at least I believe that's how it works). So that's a pretty important detail your missing. And trying to just texture that in won't do because when the slide comes back, that grove would definitely show some negative space.
The barrel of the Mac-10 has some odd things going on. It looks like you pulled some of the verts up from the one extrude you did, where as it should be perfectly circle all the way around. You have a couple spots that should be flat, and you have a curve to them, not sure if it was just a problem with your model, or how you read the reference, but it doesn't seem right.

Sorry to be so harsh and blunt, but I'm not one to sugar coat critiques, as I feel sugar coating is wasted time for something that will not benefit the artist any.

Good luck, look forward to seeing updates.

itsover3

well thanks alot for the advice with all that my next models will be alot better

The Ben

You're only 12 years old? That's very cool, man. Do you have a family member or something that models and/or textures? I'm very curious.

1. Kudos for giving it a go and modeling in the first place.
2. SUPER kudos for being cool about the feedback hammer that got dropped on you. There are folks twice your age on this forum that can't act that chill when they get critiqued. Process Flewda's advice and stick to it, and you'll be awesome by the time you are old enough to get a job modeling.

Flewda

Oh, wow, my fantastical mind totally missed the fact you are only 12. You're off to a great start bud. I started when I was 13 myself. Here's an image of my first model (done in Lightwave 3D). Ahhh this brings back memories



You really are doing a nice job for being so young dude. Keep it up.

konstruct

DAMN your only 12???? nice goin man, At this rate your gonna be a bad ass and stomp on everyones skills by the time you graduate from high school.

and yeah, what "The Ben" said- why did you decide to pick up modeling at such an early age?

itsover3

No i dont have any family members that do modeling/textureing well my bro does use autocad for engineering stuff

why did i decide to start modeling at a early age??

well i always found modeling interesting and decided to start and at an early age it kinda helps me in the l8er years

also im starting my kimber model 2day and posting progress pics so if ppl could give me advice on how to make the model etc. that would be great thnx

The Ben

Godspeed, little man. You got a good attitude, so you should do well here. Can't wait to see WIPS ("work in progress" pics).

Remember to lurk a little bit and keep your eyeballs on other people's work, AND the feedback that is given to them. There are a lot of really talented people here and you could end up learning a ton of shit just by looking and analyzing.

Peace.

itsover3

Heres the Start of my Kimber i know there is ALOT of work to be done ANY tips, advice etc. would be great.

Ott

Don't model anymore until you get the other ones fixed and to a more complete stage. Modeling practice is good, but the more you understand the full process of making a 3d model the better you are going to be. And nowadays less and less studios hire only modelers.

You are off to a great start though, don't get me wrong. My first handful of 3d objects were laughable. But, if you learn the correct principles early on, you will be so far ahead when you turn 18 you will be a prodigy :P

Flewda

Hey man,

I agree with Ott that you should fix and finish with what you have started. This is definitely something good to get in the habit of, because if you don't, you'll get to a point where you won't finish anything because you are moving on to something else. That's not good.

Anyway, here's a guy's personal site, he has a lot of weapon models on the site. Go to the weapons, and in several cases he has wireframe. While I don't agree with all his methods used (in some areas he doesn't connect verts, and leaves large n-gons) and some areas are excessively high poly for real time assets, they are overall very solid models. Check them, and study how is wireframes are, you should find it pretty useful in understand how to build your geometry better in the future too.
http://www.rms3d.com/Weapons.html

Hope that helps a bit.

Josh

itsover3

alright ill gold off on the kimber and fix up my mac 10 and beretta proly not the deagle beacause it would be less work to just remake the whole thing and might aswell finish kimber b4 that cuz i kno i can put alot more deatail into it ill add the proper hammer to beretta and fix the front of the mac10 and other things i should fix? also please comment on my kimber so far

thnx to all

konstruct

I dont know if I entirely agree with Ott and flewda with "not starting something new". Do what you want mainly because it sucks to work on stuff that you don't want to, especially if your not getting paid for it.

you already have 3 (4 now) unfinished gun models. Go back if you feel the need, but sometimes its good to start fresh.
(just make sure you learn from your mistakes as much as humanly possible)

Guns are sort of a tricky thing to start with when modeling because they are really 2d-ish. meaning the top/front silhouette is rarely interesting.

I`d suggest picking a modeling subject that focuses more on different volumes and masses. Cars are always really good for getting down clean surface modeling, and you can never go wrong with random prop stuff:

Paul Richards might be a good place to start for some simple, yet reasonably complex modeling exercises.

http://www.autodestruct.com/concept.htm

he has a lot of character weapon stuff, but if you dig around enough you`ll find he has a lot of crates, and computer console stuff that might be simple enough to bang out a bunch in a small period of time.

itsover3

well i thought starting out w/ guns would be the easiest i was thinking of doing cars but couldnt find any good refs and im not that interested in cars i did go back and fix the front of the mac 10 and clean it up. deagle isnt worth fixing might aswell make a new 1 (deleted it from the top) beretta i fixed w/ a better hammer so i dont really know what else i can do to complete those any further


Mac - 10 (couldnt fix the edge circled in black)





Beretta



please tell me if there is anything else i sohuld add to those models to make it "complete" i think they are complete right now but i could be totally wrong ill continue working on the kimber until its done or if there are things to be done further on the mac 10 or beretta after im done the kimber (ill be postings W.I.P's for it) then ill... well dunno maybe start a new gun or move onto something else please post what you think i should do AFTER im finished up my models atm

tyvm

P.S thnx alot for the site konstruct i just quickly scaned through it and it seems pretty good though some pics are a small and hard to see but thnx again

EarthQuake

Why does your mac10 have a square barrel? I think the first thing you need to do is get reference, LOTS of it, from every angle you can find. Look at other people's models, theres millions of them. Try looking here: http://www.cdg.net/forums/index.php?c=3

itsover3

yea mac10 i only had like 1 pic which was from the side and 1 from a prespective that didnt help alot so i fixed the barrel



anything else wrong??

Flewda

I think it should be more like this (note, this is a high poly piece from a Mac-10 I did more than a year ago).

I would also suggest you not bother modeling the grooves into the barrel. That can easily be done with texturing.

EarthQuake

No you didn't fix it, you seem to lack basic knowledge of how a gun works man, really really look into this stuff before your start modeling. Bullets don't have a square shape to them, they are perfectly round. Research! Get reference! Its all out there in plain view if you simply look. A barrel is really just a primitive shape, its a cylinder. Why you would spend extra time modeling it into this mystery shape is just mind boggling.

Edit: It actually seems like you're trying to model round shapes from boxes, this is a huge waste of time and you're not getting anywhere near where you should be(see the round bit on the side of your mac10, all misshapen and such).

itsover3

well yes i have absolutely NO clue how a gun works beside you pull the trigger and a bullet flys out of the barrel :S and the mac10 is only my 2nd model and i use a plane for making guns ive only used 1 video tutorial that has helped me ill try and make it look more like flewda's and i dont have a clue on how to texture and how do you make it a perfect cyclinder or do you just make a cyclinder and attach it into the model then work w/ it?

and sry if im getting annoying in a way tha im not doing much correct but im not very experienced at this ill redo the barrel again and hopefully i will get it right this time

itsover3

OK i fix the barrel (well to my knowledge and that hasnt been of much use )

the only problem is the barrel is a lil bit to high poly and the rest of the model isnt. which is a lil problem that doesnt makt a HUGE difference to me but i can fix it (i think) please tell me if the barrel is proper and if the model now looks complete or if i should touch it up

Flewda

That's better. At this point, don't even concern yourself with polycounts. Learn the process of modeling, and all the different tools and techniques. Then when you understand that a bit better, you can start worrying about Polycounts.

*Note* Don't bother wasting time trying to make all your pieces from a plane or a box. If there is a cylinder on the model, then make a cylinder primitive. If there is a sphere/ball, use the Sphere primitve. Use the right tool for the right job. Just like anything else. You wouldn't use a phillips head screw driver to unscrew a a flat head screw.

NeoShroomish

The geometry looks nice, if you want to you could improve the smoothing groups.

itsover3

well considering its done im gonna work on my kimber ill be posting updates feel free to tell me if its horrible and what to do or if its good etc. thnx

EarthQuake

I wouldnt really call it done, but i think you should move onto something new. You'll learn quite a bit hopefully from your mistakes with your old models and hopefully improve on your new stuff. Just keeping doing this over and over, keep making more models, dont worry if your really finish them, you're just starting out so you're not going to be making great finished quality work anyway. And keep posting here

itsover3

here's and update on my kimber please tell me how im doing and what improvements i can do to it and stuff there is still alot of work to be done.

konstruct

try and get these edge loops straigtend out first-
Rotate the loops to line them up in a radial fashion. Keep in mind to scale them to keep with width of the bar consistant. (dont let rotating them squash the bar)

Also next time you attempt something like this, try looking into what the term "loft" means. Lofting is an ancient method for creating tubes, wires, etc and I think you`ll find quite usefull.

Also as far as your current posting posting of your models, try and post some perspective SHADED wireframes. Right now its hard to critiqe your models because you post a dead on side wireframe, wich really only shows some vagure silouette info. Then the perspective where we can see how everything is connected, is free of any wireframe, so its tought to tell if your intersecting objects, or modeling everything out etc etc-

itsover3

sry ive benn away but now im back and im finishing up my kimber heres some pics any advice would be awesome thnx