Armalite AR-10
polycounter lvl 13
Moving up from binoculars to GUNS. Here's an Armalite AR-10 battle rifle, predecessor to the M16. This is my first attempt at modeling a real life weapon from photo reference. Hopefully I'll learn a few things and improve myself before advancing to MAKE BELIEVE!
Anyway, here's some reference and high poly underway:
Anyway, here's some reference and high poly underway:
Replies
. . . armalite. . .
As you can see I didn't pull off the un-creasiest hole-riddled cylindrical object, but my source material has some imperfect creases in it as well, so it doesn't bother me that much.
If you haven't done so already, I highly suggest you visit the 'How You Model Dem Shapes?' thread. http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=56014
They've already helped me with the exact same problem. The solution that was given to me was to start with a cylinder with many sides (64), that way the cylinder supports itself and you don't have to add support edges that create creasing.
Hope that helps!
Step 1:
create a plane completely flat, with your shapes cut out of it. I started with a rectangular spline, filleted the edges and extruded from there then just duplicated along. If you start with a spline the curve should be perfect when smoothed. Add a shell modifier to the plan and then add control edges (as you can see in the exploded image) to control the smoothing of your object as you wish.
Step 2:
Add a turbosmooth modifier to your model
Step 3:
Apply a bend modifier. Make sure this is on top of the smooth model otherwise you will get unwanted creases. Bend it 360 degrees bla bla bla.
Step 4:
Symmetry modifier and voila.
You can tell by the highlight on the mesh in step 3 thats theres no smoothing errors whatsoever. If you applied the bend before the smooth you will get errors around the corners of your cutouts.
Hope thats of some help.
In the mean time, here's an update on the pain-in-the-ass ejection port area. I don't know if that's actually what it's called, but it sounds good to me. Took me a couple tries to get this part down, especially since my reference doesn't give a lot of close up detailed information of the area from different angles.
Also, Chungking pointed out earlier that some of the details are a little off. That's because my reference is taken from 2 or 3 versions of the same gun with some slight variations. The reference for this gun isn't exactly prolific, so I took what I could get and I might have mixed and matched some features here and there. Overall I think it doesn't matter greatly.
btw I like the high poly a lot, lets see how this ends
it actually wouldn't take away any form at all assuming you're using alpha maps, you can fit the whole gun on 1 tri
It's taken me 2 weeks and 2 days to get to this point, but the low poly bakedown is finally finished. I'm so inexperienced at doing good bakedowns. I can make it look good but it takes me for-EVER.
It ended up being just shy of 7,000 triangles.
Here's some shots:
These are realtime screen grabs from the Max viewport. In Max 2010 there's realtime shadows which I've got turned on for these.
who needs textures after that
The bake looks nice as mentioned but i'd recommend giving more attention to the ass end of it, particularly where stock meets the reciever, it's looking pretty crunchy and would be mad noticable in an ingame POV.
Hi Harry. All critiques are welcome. I need em to improve after all. Plus a fresh set of eyes always helps when you've been working on something for a while. Feel free to post what you're thinking.
I know you're using this reference but I think you can vary the style if you want. I think the red/brown looks horrible on the AR10 Airsoft version as well.
I love the texture quality on these real models
Nistrum, the render was taken from Marmoset which uses lighting based on skyboxes. It's not really possible to get a nice looking cubemap reflection in a scope lense. The closest you can get is by cranking the spec map of the lense to pure white, thereby reflecting the skybox as crisply as possible (which doesn't end up being all that crisp for whatever reason).
In other words, that earlier screenshot is misleading in terms of the quality of the reflection in the lense. That's probably the best looking angle you get for that. I'll include an FPS view anyway though.
kaburan: This model is more of an exercise in accurate reference modeling than anything else, so I'm probably gonna stick to the reference as closely as possible, even if it does look like ass. That bakelite plastic is nasty looking stuff isn't it :P
No new texture work yet:
If you want the process that I followed, though, head here for the whole rundown:
http://racer445.com/pages/tutorials/ak-tutorial.php
I exaggerated the textures a little bit to make them pop better and make model a bit more interesting. I think I'll be sticking this in my portfolio after I do a few more beauty shots. I'm also gonna try to get it into UT3 as a working weapon, but that's a secondary goal. We'll see.
Thanks to all who commented for helping me get this far.