Very rough concept for the Desert Eagle "Void Hawk", intended as an entry for the CS:GO competition, drawing inspiration from Alien(s), Bladerunner and Space: 1999, the unremarkable colour scheme and overly utilitarian look should fit Mil-spec rarity well. Gunsmith will be the finish style.
Multiply versus overlay are methods for blending. I make an assumption the calculation is same in Unreal as photoshop. You can read how they work and intended uses here: Multiply, Screen, and Overlay Blending Modes in Photoshop - dgrin (smugmug.com)
The one issue with that is that for some reason clay polish fucks your geometry causing weird warping and then needs Zremeshing/Dynameshing after wards. If you don't intend to sculpt afterwards then this method works in a much cleaner way than traditional polish.
Well, thats just the nature of polymodeling versus nurbs surfaces for perfect reflections. There are ways to transfer surface shading in sub-d from a proxy mesh, but I only know how to do it in Max and Blender, not Maya. Are you intending to subdivide?
Yes, I agree with make CG. That's exactly what I was thinking. That sculpt is awesome, by the way. It might look better if those mini horns were enlarged. I guess they're intended to be smaller than typical, though. It's up to you.
There is no such thing as too dense or too low - It just depends on the intended use of the model. What you are doing at the moment is pretty much in line with what one would see in a realtime ingame cinematic made for a project like Uncharted or StarCraft II.
Texturing progress update, approaching intended appearance, still a long way to go, hues and balances need fixing, extra detail textures need to be implemented and specular exponent mapping needs a lot of work. The cyber-apocalyptic look is starting to show.
Props Man. Hehe No pun intended. My hats off to you though. After banging my head against the hammer editor all week I am exhausted with how un-intuitive that engine is. These look amazing. Keep it up.
Hey thanks for the responses everyone. Gallows: Yeah you're not the first person to say that either, I may have to go in and round that out a bit more. I always intended it to be somewhat flat like but it could use a bit more roundness to it.
I have almost 2 months of free time for it and I intend to make it really simple. To be honest I've never done anything like this - I will finish the concept first and then decided how it should continue. And thank you for your feedback :)