Hey! Not a professional here, but maybe I can give you some tips anyway. Your texture looks like a nice base but left unfinished. It's lacking details like wear & tear, markings, engraved text or simply something like texture on the grip. Weapon grips usually have a rough texture to them to improve the grip (just google…
You can read more here about how IOR fits into the whole shading system: https://www.adobe.com/learn/substance-3d-designer/web/the-pbr-guide-part-1 However this doc isn't really written with artists in mind, unless they're already pretty technically-inclined. It's written more for graphics engineers. But you should still…
to trigger a 90 versus 180 degree turn around animation or something in between, it mostly depends on how many unique animations that you want to make. of course you could create a unique animation for 70 degree or 125 degree but you probably find diminishing returns. if high believability is what you are after, then…
If you triangulate the mesh, the patterns lines are aligned with the right angle UV edges of each triangle: Aligning UV borders with pixel grid will help to reduce visible seams. If you are mainly projecting or painting in 3d space when texturing, the distortion will be in the textures (important to have consistent…
I think your blade's poly count is definitely within reason, you have a clean silhouette and a clean bake; I wouldn't change it. Maybe up the poly count on the grip? If this were a first person model, then anytime the grip is viewed from longways (maybe never?) it absolutely will look terrible. You could easily make that a…