As supaclueless said, floaters would work for all the details on that fore grip. The vertical slots, the "Dimples" (cutouts) the screws sit in, and the screw themselves. They key is having the edge of the floater mimic the surface you're trying to fake it on to, so it appears seamless. Things complicate a touch more when…
using floaters will probably be the fastest method for making those screws if you plan to bake it down. A word of warning though if you do plan to bake this into a LP using floaters. The "thicker" the screw, the more you have to push your cage, making it less accurate and prone to making warped normals on the edges around…
Maxviz I hope this helps, but yeah you could go the floater route as well. the proportions might be a little off. Let me know if you need anything else
Looks like you did alright? Just way too much of an indent, in the ref its barely going in. Probably simpler and cleaner to just make all those indents a floater though
..and for anyone else who is bad at searching the polycount wiki, here is the info on floaters: http://wiki.polycount.com/AmbientOcclusionMap#Floating_Mesh_Problem Google search helped me find it just now. Either way, thanks for your help guys!
FLOATERS Finally someone else who finds it as funny as i do :D make sure weight all points is turned on. Xforms are reset. after that try tweaking the falloff value are you working at a realistic scale?
I modeled an interesting shape last night. It was a bit of a challenge and I cheated a bit with floaters, but the detail will be pretty small on the final model (and hidden under the model). If anyone wants to try taking on the challenge, have fun.
Several ways, model all the panels, cut into them and separate them, the opposite, model therm separate from the beginning, keep it solid and cut into it in zbrush using hard surface brushes, use spline lofted floaters. take your pick.
The only way I can think of to do that easily would be to have the long extrusions as a single mesh and the circular parts as floaters. But really if you're planning on baking anyway ndo would be the simplest. Doing that as a single mesh would be quite tricky.