Introduction
Hello there! My name is Yalchik Ilya, I am 21 years old and im 3D Environment artist. My work is focused on creating the exterior and interior of locations.
Goals and inspiration
I have long wanted to practice making weapons and decided to start with something not as big as a carbine or a sniper rifle. The main purpose of creating this work was to improve my personal skills in working with references, hard surface modelling, a bit of sculpting and detailed texturing.
References
Collecting references is an extremely important step, you do not want to lack in the number of images you can gather. if you do, the work may not turn out to be as detailed and similar to the original as it could be, and this applies not only to weapons.
To search for references, I use all kinds of sources: YouTube, Google, Pinterest, as well as various sites of auctions, museums and collectors.
Texturing
Texturing is one of the most interesting stages of work, this is where you can create the history of your asset. As I said earlier, I was inspired by a museum gun that I saw, its scratches, condition, level of contamination, metal overflows and so on.
Fun fact, I did the milling already at the texturing level with the help of a welding seam brush.
At the beginning of the texturing phase, I try to decide on the base color, after that, I add color variations for a more interesting picture. Do not underestimate the various generators and filters that are available out of the box, fine-tuning them manually with the help of brushes can get an impressive result.
It is very important to convey to the viewer the physical properties of the materials so that there is a feeling that they can touch, for example, metal, you want the viewer to feel its coldness and texture.
An important fact is that you need to periodically export the texture maps to Marmoset or other rendering environment to see what comes out in the end, as colors and roughness may be slightly different than what you expected.
Once you have completed the texturing with the base, you can proceed to work out the details, again we need to turn to the references.
It is these details that create the history of the asset:
How it was made (cut, milled, and so on). Was it often dismantled, often used, has it got scratches on the equipment or even burned.
I repeated the marking number on my model from the photo I took in the museum. Details like this make the work more interesting.
The places of contact with the hands will be more glossy and rubbed, various prints will appear there and vice versa and places where it is difficult to climb with fingers will be more clogged with various dust, dirt and oil.
It’s worth thinking about how it works:
Mechanical parts scratch from each other when used, it’s worth transferring this on the roughness map, it will add realism to your asset.
To create the wood material, I used standard wood from a Substance Painter and projected it onto the handle, modified it and added more details, working with the texture, mixing various maps, generators and AO texture maps, based on references.
To create the effect of extruded and indented metal from the stamp, I used anchors and various modifiers, which can be seen in the following screenshots.
Rendering
For rendering, I used Marmoset 4. Having set the camera settings (in the post effects section I set the value of the tone mapping to ACES and twisting the sliders in the section to taste).
I proceed to set the lighting of the model. I usually use 3 directional lights. I put a source that conveys the color and roughness of the model.
The next source I create is highlighting the back contours of the model to make the model more voluminous and visually interesting.
The last light I use is for highlighting dark areas or creating highlights in deep places, highlighting edges.
If you put all the sources together, you get something like this:
I hope my article was useful for you, I wish you all the success in your work and hope to see you here again!
Thanks GamesArtist!
