Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

WIP Sig Sauer P320

polygon
Offline / Send Message
Boosted24v polygon
Even though its the same gun, figured I'd start a new thread because everything before this is kinda irrelevant, we don't need to see that mess lol. I'd gotten just about to the stage of baking my low and high poly models when I saw Phoenix's finished Styer F90 rifle, which inspired be to do better. On my old model basically my entire "body" portion was a solid piece, the buttons and switches were floaters, detail was kinda low, even on simple things. So I deleted many of the smaller pieces and have been deconstructing and rebuilding the major pieces. I've learned quite a lot even in this stage, not long ago any kinda major change I'd scrap the whole part and now I've learned how to make big changes with out having to start completely over. Huge time saver. Although I've gotten 26 pieces currently modeled i'll show y'all a few of them (low poly at the moment) to get an idea, an as I start getting things into Zbrush for high poly smooth and polish i'll show off more of it. Lets be honest, we only really care about the high poly shots anyway, right?

So as I said before, my previous "body" was completely solid, minus the rounded portion in the from that the slide recoils into. Now its fully carved out, holes for buttons and switches an all.

Also I'd been keeping it fairly "stock" in the past, but the P320 has an ungodly amount of customization options, much like an AR platform rifle. So I went with a Keres Dynamics trigger and magazine release button to spice things up a bit.
The take down lever is still stock, but much more detailed than the previous version, an fully modeled to pass through the body as it should in real life.

The slide was probably the most detailed part of my old model, but it was still mostly solid, aside from where the barrel and recoil spring went. In these pictures I've returned the slide to what I refer to as a "Blank state" Its the highest level of detail I can achieve before modeling a specific slide, whether stock, or custom. I've also added a lot of detail that wasn't previously there. For instance, the rail track on the bottom that the slide rides on.

Its fully boxed, no back faces are visible from any angle.
Instead of having the Sear housing cap just floating on top of the slide model, the cavity has been carved out for it.

Hopefully in the next couple days i'll have some high poly shots in Zbrush to really make this thing shine.

Replies

  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Couple new shots of the full low-poly assembly as it stands currently. Today so far I finished up the iron sights and optic plate. In previous runs I went with plain jane from the factory iron sights including a 1-piece rear sight/optic plate. This time around I cut a notch to incorporate fully modular iron sights, of which I went with TruGlo TFX fiber optic sights front and rear with a Razorback Optic plate. I wasn't quite sure how to accurately make the hex head inset on the screws for the optic plate so I'll have to come back to that at a later time.



    an in case you happened to peep down the hole where the barrel would normally be, an thought "what the heck is that?" The FCU or Fire Control Unit is fully modeled, minus some tiny springs, its all there.


    So next ill be finishing up the details for the stock slide, the grip notches on the front and rear of the slide, modeling a new a new extractor pawl, new barrel. I want to do both a stock barrel and a extended and threaded barrel, as well as a stock and custom slide. Along with a PMM recoil compensator block, Bushwhacker 46 suppressor, Sig Sauer Romeo 1 reflex sight and a rail mounted XH35 Surefire tac-light
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Well did another pass on the optic plate and got the indentations to pop a little more, also think I got the hex head bolt detail figured out.

    Got the barrel more or less done and installed and the slide serrations. Might do another detail pass on it tomorrow, I know there's at least one more thing I can do. The recoil....spring....is in, but it lacks its spring. I gotta figure out how to model a spring for it.

    I can't promise its 100% mechanically accurate but its definitely pretty darn close!
    With the FCU chassis hidden you can get a better look at the barrel integration with the FCU and how the take down lever would interact with the recoil spring.


  • lluc21
    Offline / Send Message
    lluc21 polycounter lvl 5
    You're really going the extra mile with this one! Mad details!
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    lluc21 said:
    You're really going the extra mile with this one! Mad details!

    Thanks for the support! I'd had been just trying to model it using just external shots but i found myself skipping many details just because they weren't very well defined or I didn't know what the part was. So I shifted my thought to just model everything and I can't tell you how many "ah ha" moments I had as things came together and I'm like "oh snap! that's what that detail was" etc. It's become kinda like an anatomy study of a striker fire handgun. I'm a big firearms enthusiast in real life, but probably 90% of my real world experience is with rifles and machine guns, more specifically M4,M14,M249 and M240B. So doing a pistol has been a fun learning experience both in and learning modeling and about pistols in general. I also have a strong background as a truck/equipment mechanic so the mechanics of it is fascinating as well. Kinda like a 3D gunsmith lol. I want to keep refining the model and adding as much detail as possible. It'd be cool to do a parts explosion at the end, an maybe an animated video of the gun being field stripped for cleaning.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Well I wasn't as productive as I would have liked today, I just couldn't focus to save my life. But we did make some progress!

    So I did another detail pass on the barrel like I had mentioned with a couple edges that needed to be beveled, an was able to make a perfect ramp up into the barrel.

    After accomplishing this I took a step back for a second and realized I still had a couple kinda bland details from a couple pieces I already finished. So I went back and did another pass on the Slide lock lever and the manual safety switch.

    The slide catch was completely flat and needed some work, I came up with this which isn't far from accurate, but I think I may refine is more later.
    The Manual safety switch was a whole other animal. This piece was saved from the last model, it was a floater. With some knife cuts and extrusions I made its mount that attaches it to the body. This all became a little hectic when trying to make some changes. I opted to split it into three separate meshes and work on them individually.
    Once all three pieces were done being worked on an in a state I was happy with, I used the pieces as boolean objects to create new geo which allowed me to seamlessly merge them all back into one single mesh.

    Last and arguably the most exciting new thing is the recoil spring now actually has a spring!


  • Zi0
    Offline / Send Message
    Zi0 polycounter
    Nice progress!
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    @Zi0 Thanks! means a lot since you were one of my very first critics.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Spent a lot of my day trying to smooth out the body today, but for the most part made more of a mess than smoothing haha so I only kept some of the changes. The real accomplishment was building the first attachment, just needs a couple of screws, bolts and some buttons.

    SIG SAUER Romeo 1 Pro Reflex sight.

    This was my first ever attempt at it, an Blender crashed half way through the build after hours of work, nearly had a heart attack, was able to recover the auto save thank god. So I hope its not crap. I'm proud of it.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Some more fine details for the Romeo 1 Pro


  • rsavoie356
    Offline / Send Message
    rsavoie356 polycounter lvl 3
    Wow, you really went all in on this! Nice work! :)
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    @rsavoie356 Thank you! appreciate it, good to be finally good enough to get some positive comments LOL! But I feel like just saying screw it and modeling every single little piece has grown my modeling skill 100x over just looking at fully assembled external pictures and trying to model it based on that. Obviously wont be a game model in this state, but id love to model out every single detail i can and have a hyper realistic end product for renders. i'd also like to see if I could rig it and do like a field strip animation and make functionality kinda like a cut away or x-ray view of everything working through loading, round chamber, fire, recoil/eject and rechamber.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    A labor of love, and a quest for knowledge. Quick progress update on some tweaks an further variation in customization. After all, whats the point in making the one of the worlds most modular sidearms with out some options?

    Finally got the magazine done, Suppose I held that project off long enough. 21 round magazine, 9mmx19 para hallow points and detachable extended base.
    Also decided to change my left side only magazine release to be ambidextrous, mainly because the flush cut on the right hand side seemed to irk me. lol.
    adding some more customization, quick copy past of the "compact body" followed by some quick tweaks landed me a "full body" option. A similar process with the barrel, to make an extended, threaded barrel to accept attachments like suppressors and compensators.
    The threaded barrel has a removable cap to protect the threads. I modeled it all as one piece though. However I did model the knurling on the cap, my first time ever doing that. I think it came out nice.

  • Kanni3d
    Offline / Send Message
    Kanni3d ngon master
    Great progress and attention to detail :) You mentioned these are your highpoly shots? Looks like an uber tight curvature map overlayed a low-res mesh. I know you're going more for realism and less for game art, so the super tight edges can be overlooked.

    If these are your already dynameshed/polished parts, I would give those round/cylindrical segments muuuuch more topology, since you can see the faceting from the low amount of cylinder segments.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Kanni3d said:
    Great progress and attention to detail :) You mentioned these are your highpoly shots? Looks like an uber tight curvature map overlayed a low-res mesh. I know you're going more for realism and less for game art, so the super tight edges can be overlooked.

    If these are your already dynameshed/polished parts, I would give those round/cylindrical segments muuuuch more topology, since you can see the faceting from the low amount of cylinder segments.

    @Kanni3d I appreciate the support! Although one could argue some of the parts have a level of detail indicative of a high poly, this is all still in blender as low-poly models. For sure once it gets into zbrush the edges will be polished and faceted areas that should be smooth, will be, for instance the body. The hard metal parts I feel like i nailed the shapes/detail almost perfect but I'd agree the body which is a polymer plastic could be modeled much better. I still have a lot to learn in the area of proper topology and still have yet to make any kind of real attempt at sub-d modeling. Currently just low-poly models with heavy boolean work. 100% open to pointers or suggestions and criticism  if you or anyone would like to point out a part or area that could be done better even as a low poly. That's a huge part of this whole project :)  
  • Kanni3d
    Offline / Send Message
    Kanni3d ngon master
    Ah yeah interesting, looked like the edges have an uber tight bevel on them, my first assumption was its a low poly with some sorta shader for edges lol. Then read back to see you mentioned these are high-res's
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    @Kanni3d Yeah Blender has "flat shading" and "smooth shading" its kinda hokie an i don't think it actually changes anything because for example when I export to zbrush the smooth shading vanishes. So I just use it on certain parts to get an idea of what it might end up looking like. If you'd like I could shade everything flat an throw up some shots and it will give you its true form.

    EDIT: I also have an option turned on for cavity, I'm not even sure what that is, but it seems to change the shading and highlights edges.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Another part down, Parker Mountain Machine PMM X-Comp recoil compensator.


  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Well I've finally finished the base meshes for export to zbrush. The last two components are an aftermarket Sig Sauer Pro-cut slide and an XH-35 Surefire weapon light. I was gonna do a suppressor but with the components I have its just enough for two different builds. Perhaps when I'm ready to start making full on game assets I can come back an add more attachments/customization.

    Sig Sauer Pro-cut slide

    XH35 SureFire weapon light. This thing was an butt kicker for me, an actually skipped out on a lot of detail just because I wasn't sure how to do it. But I still think it came out fairly nice.

    With the components modeled I have enough for two pretty different configurations that I shall dub "Street Fighter" and "Tacti-cool"

    P320 "Street Fighter"
    P320 "Tacti-cool"

    So now to get everything into Zbrush an have some more fun.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Sitting pretty at about 78 million active points. "Tacticool" got its polish and mostly smoothed out. It took a bit to get to this point, guess I had a few more things to learn before it was ready. Over came a lot of obstacles but we made it this far, an with every step, new problems and challenges. I got a few things to work out yet, which I'm sure most of you will spot. But here's what I got so far.   I'm not quite sure why the rounded portions of some of the objects still have the faceted lines, they are smooth as glass. But maybe ill figure something out. I had found a way in blender to mach them super smooth (an look it) using some modifers but we shall see. How things continue to go. Still a rookie lol. 
  • Tiggis
    Offline / Send Message
    Tiggis triangle
    The faces you see is because you need more sides on curves surfaces to be able to smooth them out in Zbrush, I guess you can drag the polish by feature a couple times, but in my opinion it's better to have a few extra loops/sides on curve surfaces, so you don't have to drag polish by feature 50 million times to have it look smooth. There is also the way you can use dynamic subdiv in Zbrush and boolean too.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Tiggis said:
    The faces you see is because you need more sides on curves surfaces to be able to smooth them out in Zbrush, I guess you can drag the polish by feature a couple times, but in my opinion it's better to have a few extra loops/sides on curve surfaces, so you don't have to drag polish by feature 50 million times to have it look smooth. There is also the way you can use dynamic subdiv in Zbrush and boolean too.

    I kinda figured it was due to lack of loops, atleast in the case of the bottom of the slide and recoil comp. However I figured the weapon light would have enough at 60 something sides. I had achieved a damn near perfect look in blender using the bevel modifier and weighted normals but it didn't go over to zbrush, maybe theres something I can tweak in the export settings so it does. As for zbrush I have very very little experience with it so far, probably the equivalent to a single snowflake on the tip of the iceburg so I've been looking up lots of videos an how-tos. Also a few parts on the body I'm struggling with, mainly the transitions where the trigger guard meets the rest of the body. But I'm determined to get it right.
  • Tiggis
    Offline / Send Message
    Tiggis triangle
    Tiggis said:
    The faces you see is because you need more sides on curves surfaces to be able to smooth them out in Zbrush, I guess you can drag the polish by feature a couple times, but in my opinion it's better to have a few extra loops/sides on curve surfaces, so you don't have to drag polish by feature 50 million times to have it look smooth. There is also the way you can use dynamic subdiv in Zbrush and boolean too.

    I kinda figured it was due to lack of loops, atleast in the case of the bottom of the slide and recoil comp. However I figured the weapon light would have enough at 60 something sides. I had achieved a damn near perfect look in blender using the bevel modifier and weighted normals but it didn't go over to zbrush, maybe theres something I can tweak in the export settings so it does. As for zbrush I have very very little experience with it so far, probably the equivalent to a single snowflake on the tip of the iceburg so I've been looking up lots of videos an how-tos. Also a few parts on the body I'm struggling with, mainly the transitions where the trigger guard meets the rest of the body. But I'm determined to get it right.
    Zbrush can take some time to get your head around. As for you light and things I said above, you want to use polish by feature(hollow circle) to smooth out your curves surfaces and after that use polish/polish crisp edges on your edges to make them smooth. It is also good to use polygroups when you are using polish by feature.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Tiggis said:
    Zbrush can take some time to get your head around. As for you light and things I said above, you want to use polish by feature(hollow circle) to smooth out your curves surfaces and after that use polish/polish crisp edges on your edges to make them smooth. It is also good to use polygroups when you are using polish by feature.

    Ill give that a try, I'd basically just isolated the polygroups like you mentioned and threw a couple passes of polish crisp edges (hollow circle) an then cleaned up with a small polish on the whole subtool. Should of known that was too easy haha.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    @Tiggis Well took your advice an I think it turned out quite a bit better!
  • Tiggis
    Offline / Send Message
    Tiggis triangle
    @Tiggis Well took your advice an I think it turned out quite a bit better!
    You can still slightly see the faces on the curve surfaces. Also where the trigger guard and rail meet you can see it needs more sides there too, but you are getting there.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    After lots and lots of polish I have gotten rid of tons of unwanted faceting. I'm definitely going to have to invest some time with getting comfortable using more geo in my base models because it is so much easier to delete geo to reduce poly than it is to make a model with lower poly counts have high poly smoothness/detail.


    an one with a slightly less reflective matcap.  On a side note, Zbrush filled that hole where the takedown lever goes. So gotta fix that. Also there are some lines in the model you can see, which unfortunately seems there is not hot a whole lot I can do about them because that's where the UV seams are. Though I'm hoping once it comes down to texturing in substance painter they wont even be noticeable.

  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Slight back peddle on the body, turns out the reason zbrush was filling that whole was due to some mesh errors, but the process the the way that I found that out, was also the way that I came to my new result. So after fixing the mesh errors, I brought it back into zbrush, ran it through zremesher, threw on some high res sub-d then dynameshed it for some touch ups. Here it is decimated down to 81k active points. I think it came out much better. Only issue I have with this process is I lose my polygroups when doing zremesher, since its based on UV shells. I'm not sure how this will affect me down the road if at all but the battle continues.


  • Zi0
    Offline / Send Message
    Zi0 polycounter
    One thing you can try is to subdivide the mesh before using dynamesh. First use group by normals in the polygroup section and after that use Crease PG (which you can find under Geometry tab and then Crease) this will create support edges that you will need in order to subdivide. Let me show you how it  works



    This should work on most of the parts. Good luck :)
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    @Zi0 I was actually Looking for something like this for one part in particular. I wasn't able to get this to work right off the rip in zbrush because none of my parts were made with Sub-D, which is my fault, high geo and sub-D have been pretty intimidating. But after seeing this I took to an experiment. I went back into blender and on my magazine tossed on some sub-D and worked it a little bit until I was fairly happy with it. Imported back into zbrush, followed your steps (able to do that now that the faces don't have crazy triangulation.) and come up with a result I think is far beyond what I would have been able to come up with otherwise. I was already thinking it, but after this experiment its undeniable  that I gotta learn sub-d modeling and start using it from the first vertice to the last and it'll probably take my models to a whole new level.

    In Blender:

    Zbrush after Sub-D, Dynamesh and some polish:

    Thanks for the advice!
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    So I liked the result of the sub-d on the magazine so much I went back on basically everything i'd done in zbrush up to that point. I've been doing mesh edits and tweaks of hours on end. Some parts were super easy, other just don't wanna work for me, reflex sight and optic plate currently have been a huge headache and I can't figure them out. But I will, eventually...I hope. LOL. I'm at about 50% done pushing things through zbrush after tweaks for sub-d enhancement.

    Highpoly magazine, bullets and mag-base
    I think the body is looking just a smidge better than the initial model
    Got almost all the slide components done, however the optic plate and reflex sight have been putting up a good fight. Havent tried the pro-cut slide yet, honestly little nervous about that one lol.

    16 out of 32 parts completed for high poly


  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Pulled an all nighter and now everything is done for the highpolys minus the reflex sight, and optic plate, still at my wits end trying to get them to work, may have to go a different route with them but will only settle for the best result I can muster.


  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Nothing final by any means, I got a lot to learn when it comes to texturing in substance painter, But, here are some early renderings of some of the pieces in substance's Iray engine.


  • Tiggis
    Offline / Send Message
    Tiggis triangle
    Good tip when it comes to texturing is to get the base colors down to all the parts first. Then start with either metal or plastic and get one of them finished, so you don't jump between metal and plastic at the same time when you are texturing. This video where Ethan Hiley talks about texturing in SP maybe has some good info too.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    @Tiggis I gave it a watch and definitely some great info. I knew the edge wear an, really most of my basic texturing wasn't ideal. I just simply didn't know how to change it haha. He was doing a bunch of things in that video I didn't even know were possible. I can't way to dive more in depth with it but currently getting my ass kicked trying to bake normal maps. I brought a whole set up into substance, body, mag, ammo, slide, attachments. About 80% of it bakes pretty well, I'm assuming the errors I'm getting are UV related because some of the errors are on parts that were previously ok. I'm wondering if I simply got too much crap on 1 UV layout. Currently wearing out google trying to find answers.
  • Tiggis
    Offline / Send Message
    Tiggis triangle
    @Tiggis I gave it a watch and definitely some great info. I knew the edge wear an, really most of my basic texturing wasn't ideal. I just simply didn't know how to change it haha. He was doing a bunch of things in that video I didn't even know were possible. I can't way to dive more in depth with it but currently getting my ass kicked trying to bake normal maps. I brought a whole set up into substance, body, mag, ammo, slide, attachments. About 80% of it bakes pretty well, I'm assuming the errors I'm getting are UV related because some of the errors are on parts that were previously ok. I'm wondering if I simply got too much crap on 1 UV layout. Currently wearing out google trying to find answers.
    Did you say you put things like sight and light in the same uv layout as the gun itself? It's better to seperate things like sight, lights and other attachment to their own uv layout.
  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    Well I finally managed to get the UVs good enough to get a clean bake, however, I feel the UVs themselves could be a lot better. I know these textures could be pushed a lot more but more or less this was just experimenting with different things from some tutorials and putting on smart materials and seeing how they were made an then trying to build my own. However I came to a stop, not because I couldn't do a lot more. just after seeing it all together, some parts I really like. other parts I really hate perhaps more so because of the model vs the textures. my skill level is still no where near my vision, with only 2 months of experience doing any of this. I've spent that entire time working on this model and I'm kinda burnt out with it. Reluctantly I think I'm going to shelve this project for now and focus on better modeling skills. Though I'm not gonna lie I learned a lot in every step of the process this time around so I don't regret this at all. I'll come back to it when I've refined my skills some more.


  • Boosted24v
    Offline / Send Message
    Boosted24v polygon
    I think I have now made this as completely as I can to my current skill level, body was completely rebuilt with the guidance of some awesome community members. Textures all redone. The dirt and what not I just put in to add detail, I just gained access to photoshop so once I learn how to make custom alphas and decals I can do a much cleaner, nicer texture job. I also got marmoset toolbag buttt when I tried to use it (first time) it kinda came out wonky so for this post I just decided to stick with iray renders. Theres still a laundry list of things that can be improved no doubt, But I felt enough was improved to warrant an update. I want to shift to some smaller projects to help build my skill level in all the areas of the hard surface pipeline and when I think I've improved enough I'll come back and give this project some more love. 
Sign In or Register to comment.