Went back and separated the slide from the grip so it could be more realistically animated. Re did the UV layout and started some basic stuff in substance painter.
I went to that valve talk it was very interesting, the speaker was very good. link to the valve slides for anyone who's interested ---http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2010/GDC10_ShaderTechniquesL4D2.pdf
The link works fine for me. It's a 12mb RAR file, which is a zip-like archive format. Inside is a PPTX powerpoint file with the slides from his conference talk.
That's a separate piece that sits inside the slide (the piece you're modeling at the moment). Get more reference for the gun, it seems like you might not understand how it's put together.
err... like constrain to edge, face or normal in edit poly? Don't forget to turn on PreserveUV's so sliding the edges around doesn't mess up the UV layout.
ZBrush is really nice for this. Being able to slide that canvas around by holding tilde really feels natural and a lot nicer workflow than constantly offsetting the Photoshop canvas.
Cool necrobump! In modern Maya, you can also turn on Edge or Surface slide in the Transform Contstraints via the Modeling Toolkit, or by marking menu: holding w+lmb.