I'm currently on a short work break, working on my portfolio. I've always been a big fan of Team Fortress 2, especially the Demoman. These days, I've been playing Valorant and wondered what the Demoman's original weapon would look like with Valorant's visual style.
So, I took an early concept of the Grenade Launcher and several screenshots from Valorant.
P.S.: I'm including some screenshots of the current process, and I'll try to update it daily.
Pureref:
Max Highpoly file:
Replies
I've been working on creating the model in Zbrush and the low-poly version.
Tomorrow, I'll be doing the UVs and baking.
Today, I've completed the projectile and weapon keychain, along with the UVs, and I have baked:
Today I started texturing a bit, and it looks like this:
Yes, I use 3Ds Max. I'll keep that in mind!
Let me see if i can get some input here:
On the UVs, anything that is nearly vertical or horizontal should be perfectly aligned, here are some examples. Even if the uvs become slightly distorted, its worth it so u dont get any aliasing on the model overall.
I would still go back to HP and make some changes, this model has a lot of surface area and if the edges are not fat enough it wont look as interesting as it could.
You dont need to zbrush this, have you used creases before? This way you can keep a very low density base mesh, and just add a few loops where the model becomes too stretched. We usually use 0.25 crease value on edges.
Here for example, you could make the hole on the outter mesh so that it creates a nice contact shadow on bakes
For textures, some gradients would make the gun pop a bit more, this technique is also used in characters, where you try to guide the eye to the focus point, which should be the center of the gun.
Edge wear seems to be very small, a 40% increase in size would make it look fuller.
Henriques (and Kits) work on the 4 guns here
I've redone the UVs following your advice, and I think they are now better optimized:
I had never used Crease before. Should it look like this?
can we see some wireframes ? so that i can check how dense it is. because th middle area is looking nice, but the ends are looking too sharp
So regarding the HP edges, i think u can reduce the crease value a little, to make the edges just a little bit softer. not too much tho.
Texture wise the gradients and the edge wear is looking great.
I would go and add gradients to the shells too, front to back.
Here are some oportunities to get some gradients going
I think that you could add some color variation to the edges with a soft edge mask, and slightly making it lighter greyish on metal parts, and just desaturated or yellowish on the green parts. i see that u already have a mask going but thats sharper.
Regarding the cosmetic, it needs to hold the textures well at 256 resolution.
I think I'll create some secondary weapon or melee weapon.
Now lets add emulate a skylight coming from the top with a mg_light filter which will add just a slight white highlight
Then a layer using the baked lighting filter (im assuming your using painter?) with passthrough on color
Then show a screengrab of the difuse only.
We need to make sure the shading of the gun is perceptible without any light source.
This is what these two layers will give us
Also lets add a mask to darken the bottom of the gun, u can use mg light as well, as long as its hitting from the bottom, and make it dark but this time u can add some color, but make sure to do this individually on each material group so that u can choose a color per material type.
i like to add some Redish browns from the bottom.
Post-feedback Texture Lighting:
If you look closely to the maps, u can see the difference on the roughness map, which is very important to get right, mainly having roughness variation between material types, and adding dirt and splotches to make the surface more apealing.
Small imperfections is what sells surfaces.
On the difuse map notice the contact shadowing that happens on close surfaces.
I forgot to add your gradients on top of this tho.
Added a Black Metal to some parts to create more variety.
this would be a 80% ready texture, just needs more time spent on the edge wear shapes to make it more interesting, and finish off the gradients.
Hope this helps, looking forward to see updates on this!
I'll get to it as soon as I have some time and let you know.
Something like the roughness map?
I think I'm going to start making the renders.
Link to ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/blWPKn