Mac 11 W.i.p

tj990

Well hi im new here,
My name is Tyler Newton and im fascinated with 3D and 2D art
and i would enjoy having some comments and critique.

I used 3Dsmax 9 and Photoshop 7(cs3 freakin laggs)
This is actually my first fully textured weapon but i think the texture still may need a bit of work, any advice?

So heres my mac 11 wip:

It's about 1,600 polys.

BrodyB

Model looks nice, and the texture isn't bad, either. It'll be easier to give good advice and crits if you post multiple angles and a wireframe. But from this view, I get the impression you made the texture a bit cloudy to give the illusion of metallic reflection. I'd advise against making the colormap clouded, instead leaving that to a seperate specularity map to handle reflectivity.

Cody

there is some great reference /inspiration in the contest and challenges section.
one of my favs- http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=53731&page=4

Racer445

Model looks alright, texture could use some work though.

Your metal texture looks very cloudy, trying using This tutorial to create a nice metal base texture to start from.

Are you letting the engine dynamically light this or are you going to paint the diffuse lighting yourself and use it in an older game?

tj990

well, im using a game engine called Fps Creator, and it doesnt show specular lighting so thats why i painted it like this.

Flewda

I'm not sure what your goal is for creating art. Is it just a hobby? Something you want to do for fun and your own personal satisfaction? Or is it something you wish to go into as a career choice in the future, etc.? If you are looking at it as a career thing, I would strongly suggest finding an engine that supports normal/spec, etc. Unreal 3 is probably the best choice for a free engine you can use to start messing with that stuff (or just use Max's rendering system). Normal maps and spec maps are a given on almost all projects now days. They are as common and necessary as a diffuse map in most cases. So I would suggest working on your knowledge of those as well, because it's a pretty big industry standard.

As for the Mac 11:

As it was mentioned by Racer445, the metal looks like you just used the cloud filter in Photoshop and added some scratches. This is not at all believable as metal. I may use the cloud filter very sparingly to kind of add a bit of breakup over a large surface area (I usually overlay it though, never just as my metal itself). That tutorial he also gave you is a good start to get going on a hand painted metal texture, but also don't be afraid to start from a photo ref as a base (keep in mind, I rarely find an image so perfect that I can just paste it and be finished with it). You have to really fine tune the photo to get it to be the right color, brightness, details, etc. It takes a little work, but I think it's usually a great (and quick) option to get yourself a nice base to work with.

There also seems to be very little separation between the different elements of the gun. The receiver, handle, stock, barrel, magazine, they all are using the same looking metal on your texture. However, for various reasons, on a real gun, they would not ALL be the same materials. For example, I believe the barrel would be a thick really tough metal to be able to handle the heat from the bullets passing through. However, the receiver, or handle wouldn't need to be this same material. The magazine was most likely manufactured at another place, so it would definitely not be the same metals, etc. Think about something like that. Not only is it more accurate, it is more visually appealing. When every piece looks to be cut from the same sheet of metal, it really just all blends together, and loses interest I think. Not at all saying that every piece needs to be of a different metal (because that would most likely be too much) but keep an eye on that stuff.

Your trigger guard is a little on the thin side. I always thought for a long time that trigger guards were really thin, but they are usually a bit thicker than that.



Notice the thickness in this image? It's probably 3 or 4 times thicker than you have.

Also notice that while the metals in the images are very similar in color, you can tell are not the same metals. Subtleties like this are actually a lot easier to pull off in a spec map and spec power rather than the diffuse (especially when they are all the same or similar color)

Also, get a lot of reference images of the gun, and find all the cool little details on it. There's probably a bit of text stamped on the gun that you could add for some nice details to show off (kind of like the logo you have on the top right).

Anyway, good start for your first texture. Keep it up.

tj990

Thanks for the info, and yes this is just a hobby that i may turn into work to sell.

Yeah, but i used quite a bit of references for the mac, it was meant to be unique and seeing as a real mac 11 is a dark metal it woudn't work well with the game engine im using. Theres no way unreal 3 woud work on my pc(my pc freakin sucks,)
I only want to use this engine because it's damn easy and it will help me in the future. When i upgrade tho i will cirtainly use the unreal 3 engine.

Also i didn't use the cloud filter at all on photoshop! I painted it all myself.
Anyway i'll work some more on it, ive already spent about 6-7 hours.

The only problem is that if i paint text on the model it will also be reversed on the other side of the gun because i overlapped the two layers

Heres some other pics:
Wireframe

FPS View

Other side

{scumworks}

Take Flewda's advice.

The texture is simply too uniform, no satuation/hue which seems dull to the eyes. Flewda's refs are black, while gloss and spec's add a flow. All this could easily be faked into your texture, w/o using separate maps.

Trust me, if done right you'll end up with a much better result.

tj990

alright thanks for the advice, will be working on the new maps soon.

Ironwolf

Nice Model. But im only suggesting, maybe make the mac11 texture a bit more darker?