PPSh-41 Gun

Prop Breakdown

Luiz Bueno

Luiz Bueno

Hard-Surface Artist

Artstation

Introduction

Hi, my name is Luiz Bueno, I’m 17 years old and I’m a Hard Surface 3D Artist since I was 11. I'm from Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Goals

I started this project to try to make something older and more worn out as most of the assets I made before were newer and cleaner, so I started to google for some older guns and I really liked the PPSh-41.

Softwares

In this project I used:

Blender
Marmoset Toolbag
Substance Painter

References

In my opinion, references are the most important part of creating an asset, it will help to make the model more faithful to reality and believable, it can also avoid a lot of rework for not having seen something before and having to redo it later. so I started to gather some references on google and on some old weapons sites then I put them all in the PureRef app and started blocking.

My PureRef:

Blockout

I used the references I collected before and some YouTube videos to make the blockout, I started by making the magazine and the barrel of the gun, this gives me a much better idea about the thickness of the weapon and the position of the parts.

In the past, I didn’t do any blockout and started with any random part, in the end, the barrel was too small or the magazine got too big and these problems were severe, in some cases to fix it was necessary to redo almost the entire weapon, so my tip is:

Always start the blockout/modeling by the magazine, barrel and ammo of the gun, it will save you a lot of time!

Low Poly

For the low poly, I usually model with a lot of N-gons and when I am satisfied with the result I connect the vertices or triangulate the faces, I always use the amount of polygon that is necessary for the model to look round, this avoids problems at the bake time and does not let faceted corners appear.

I removed some minor details that don’t affect the model’s silhouette as much, like small screws or details on a flat surface.

High Poly

After I made the low poly, I duplicated the model, made the missing details and used the subdivision surface and remesh modifiers to make the model with the smoothed edges, this technique is very good for keeping the edges in a homogeneous format, besides being very quick to make the high poly after the low is ready.

UVing & Baking

I separated the weapon into 2 different materials, one for the magazine and one for the gun. I also used the UV Packer add-on to maximize the space occupied in the UV.

After that, I baked it in Marmoset Toolbag 3 and separated the mesh into different bake groups to avoid intersecting one piece with another.

Texturing

When texturing the model I wanted to give it an older and used look, so I added a lot of color variations, scratches and deformations.

Wood texturing

I started by creating a fill layer with a base color for my wood, then I used the “wood” pattern, scaled and positioned it in a way that it would look nice, then I put an HSL filter on the fill layer of the pattern and used it to change the color of the base wood, after having made the pattern.

I then added some color variations and used the ambient occlusion generator to make the wood darker close to the metal, now it was time to add some scratches and deformations and correct some things manually.

Metal texturing

For the metal, I also started with a solid color, soon after I used the “flakes” texture with a blur filter to make a color variation as if that area had been heated, I also put some color variations and directional roughness, to finish off I added some scratches, dirt, creases on the edges and more color variations.