Colt 1911

Yamo

Hey guys, after lurking for a while I've decided to make my first real post

This is a low-poly of a Colt 1911 pistol that I think is probably finished, and it will be the base of my first ever attempt at normal mapping.

I've started refining the model for the high-poly, though looking back on it now that it's complete I probably would have saved myself some trouble by going high > low instead of low > high. Oh well, lesson learned



1607 tris total - the dark blue mesh is the main piece, while anything lighter blue is a separate object

Any tweaks or suggestions from all of you experienced polycounter's would be greatly appreciated! I'll be posting updates to this thread as I continue to work on the model

Gerasimimumu

How are you planning to detail it? PS or zBrush? If your answer is the latter, you would want to clean up as much tris as possible - they dont sit well with Z. I would suggest PS and crazybump.

So far, so good, good luck,
G

Yamo

For this I was planning on doing everything pretty much within Max - I'm basically following this tutorial but decided to go with my own weapon instead of the knife that he uses

Low and high both done in Max (high pretty much the same but with cleaner edges and floating geometry), normals with Max's projection mapping, texture in PS

AlecMoody

you would be much better off just putting more detail into your low poly model than doing a normal map. I made a colt 1911 with slightly more triangles than that 5 years ago.

ArcticNova83

I think you'd be better off doing it the way that tutorial says. That's usually the way it's done, and it will net you much better results. Normal maps are on EVERYTHING nowadays.

marks

I think it's pretty hard and/or foolish to try to give you advice here when we don't have the full picture. Is this a first-person-view model for an FPS? Is it gonna be viewed third-person only ala GTA? Is it a decoration/prop? The intended usage is gonna determine what you should be aiming for, and you haven't told us what that is.

Yamo

First, thanks for the replies guys

The gun will eventually be used as a prop for a character sculpt I'm doing in ZBrush. In the end it will just be a render of a posed character - no plans on taking this into any game engine (yet)

Now logic would dictate that if I'm not running this through any engine, I could definitely get away with just throwing on more detail like Alec suggested and scrap the idea of a separate low poly version (your 1911 is awesome BTW and I can only hope mine looks as good when this is done )

However, a lot of this is just for me to practice going through the normal mapping "process". I'll admit I could have picked a more interesting object to really take advantage of normal maps, but again it's mostly for practice