Avtomat Fedorov Rifle [WIP] Crit wanted

Senor Freebie

Last night, at about 4am I decided it was time to bake out the maps for my Avtomat Fedorov model for the first time. Clearly, I was very tired because when I woke up, I found that some elements didn't have their materials applied and the cage was all over the place. Nonetheless, with the help of the http://xoliulshader.com/ I was able to put together some screenshots from 3Ds MAX to gather some crit.

Also, the texturing and detail modelling is mostly done with procedural textures, asides from the scratch mask. I felt I had trouble getting the right look for the metal's and the real time shader doesn't really show the reflection as I intended.

So to reiterate; when criticising please ignore:
-Untextured flashlight
-Ray misses (holes in texture)
-flat-ish scope glass
-Physical differences between ref & model (rifle was practically hand made, had massive variation across photographed models).

Real Time screenshots (thumbnails much smaller then full images)







Scanline Render of high res assets:



REF:

Tobbo

Your wood looks like it has a good amount of roughness to it. That's cool if that's what you are going for. Maybe it's just your lighting but I would make the wood a little bit darker of a color. I can't really tell anymore due to the lighting/angles that you have given us to work with.

Senor Freebie

I'm going for rough where wear would occur. I want to give the impression of a cared for but old rifle, hence the deep grain, rings and scratches. I think you're right on the brightness of the diffuse.

Tobbo

I would also suggest adding some dirt to the metal parts of the rifle. It would be dirtier in the tighter areas. Even if the gun was taken care of, it still would probably have dirt in the crevices, etc.

Senor Freebie

I had a deeper thought about the dirt layer and realised that by multiplying an AO pass with some existing masks & a noise based procedural diffuse I'm able to produce a pretty good 'nook and cranny' dirt layer.

Senor Freebie

Had a cursory go at fixing the cage. Darkened the wood off, added a dirt layer, albeit too subtly, discovered the shader works best with lights in scene and did a scanline render as well.



Scanline:

BenHenry

I would recommend getting the Marmoset Toolbag. I used to use the xoliul shader, but it gave me some nasty looking colors. (pink and purple when I know that there is none in my diffuse texture)

Not trying to make the xoliul shader look bad, just might want to look into the Marmoset Toolbag.
Your normals are too thick (deep, whatever). Also, did you make a HP version of this gun?

Senor Freebie

Yes, mostly it's just mesh-smoothed, but I used a displace layer to create scratches, wood grain and a few other portions of the main rifle part. Also, just noticed that the z-depth on the shadows for the scanline render is way off.

Senor Freebie

I already had Marmoset on my PC from a recommendation from Spitfire, the same guy who encouraged me to join this board, but I'd had some trouble getting it to work when I tried to test it out so I left it alone. This time I persisted and while I'm still not quite sure what's wrong with the toolbag or indeed where all the options I want are I did get pretty close to my desired result. My bakes are still screwing up a little bit, but I'm only working on this a bit each evening thanks to long render times so that should be resolved in days not hours :P

Also, I haven't converted any of the high res models normal maps into AO yet, so some smaller details may not be standing out as much as they should. Nonetheless; 95%?

Any more crit?

Image is a link to super-high res...