Hello all!

My Mauser C96 project is slowly coming along. The last couple of months have been pretty hectic, but I recently managed to land a job at Mighty Canvas which I'm having lots of fun with! But now I finally have some time to work on this bad boy!

I finished the lowpoly & got the bakes to a point I'm pretty happy with for now. Also started with some basic materials & presentation, but there's a long way to go for sure :P

For this project I wanted to explore a locked-normals workflow to get cleaner bakes. I've been exploring MigNormalTools for Maya, and with a little tweaking I've gotten some nice results. The main reason for using locked normals is so that I can avoid normal-gradients on flat areas. I recognize this isn't that important for artstation weapons, but I wanted to practice the workflow for my production work. In game you can sometimes get issues on normal map gradients when the texture is mip-mapped. So I generally think it's a good practice to have in your tool belt. I also think it's pretty satisfying to bake a clean normal map. But maybe that's just me haha.

Anyway, here is an example of the receiver, where I locked the sides to point directly outward. This ensures that the flat areas will have a perfectly flat normal color. Now, most normal information is constrained to curved areas.

That's all for now, hopefully I can get this out in a reasonable time frame.

Cheers!

Hi all!

Been a busy few months lately, but I finally got some time & energy to work on personal projects again!

I just finished the highpoly for the Mauser C96 "red nine," rocking a cone hammer. I decided to go for the older model cone-hammer & trigger, since I just think it looks better. For the gun nerds out there, we can have a discussion in the comments about the mechanical / historical implications of this ^^

Don't have as much time as I used to, so this project will be on the back burner for now. I've also noticed that I have a tendency to burn myself out when balancing work with personal projects - so I will take my time with this one.

But that's all I've got for now, cheers!

Hi all!

Progress is steadily being made and I think the end is finally in sight - so this will hopefully be the last update for the Winchester!

I have been focusing most of my time recently on the wood, and really pushing it as far as I can. I've also worked a little on the metal - adding some more wear and breakup to the surfaces.

Now I want to work on implementing some really good feedback I got about adding more personality and storytelling to the material. There are also a couple of areas around the cylindrical forms where I want to straighten out the normal map a bit more. Apart from the texturing, I want to spend some time on the presentation and push my lighting a bit further.

I also really need to get my hands on some more RAM, since I've been wanting to try texturing in 4k - but substance seems to be eating my 16gb of ram for breakfast... But that will probably have to wait until the next project.

That's all for now. Cheers!

Hi all!

I've managed to get some more time to work on the shotgun, and have made some progress on the texturing! I have some basic wear & tear set up, but intend on spending the next couple of weeks working on more specific details. I also really want to improve the wood textures, as I think they are a bit "plastic-y" at the moment.

All in all, I'm having a lot of fun with this so far. Don't know when It'll be finished, but I really want to push the textures for this piece - so I'll take my time! :D

But that's all for me, see u soon!

Cheers!

Hi all! It's blog time! :D

There has been a lot of stuff happening during the last month. I recently just finished my game-art portfolio, and TGA had their annual Meet And Greet earlier this week - which was a lot of fun! Thanks to all the amazing game studios for attending this year! I also had a blast writing the article for the Games Artist website!

But with all that done and dusted, I finally have some time to work on personal projects again. And would you believe it - it's another gun!

I have been working on and off on this for the last 2-3 weeks, so I've managed to get it baked and begun with some base-materials. There is still some minor tweaks needed on the lowpoly, but the next two weeks will most likely be spent on the texturing and presentation.

Really exited to be working on a personal project again.

But with that said, until next time! Cheers!

Hi!

I've been busy this week and managed to finish the highpoly as planned, I also had time to finish up the lowpoly & UVs! :D

Progress so far:

Recently I've been doing some test-baking in order to fix issues with the Lowpoly & UV's, while also optimizing for maximal UV real-estate and the usual triscount. 

I take optimizing my UV-space very seriously, and like to stack as many shells as possible - without sacrificing major model accuracy. That way I get more texture resolution, and most importantly - I don't have to texture as big of an area manually. I also decided to split up the optic to another UV-set, as that will enable for the scope to be changed out / removed without wasting a major part of the texture.

Highpoly

Lowpoly - Around 10k tris with optic - 8k wihout

Shells highlighted in green are stacked

Bake result

Next week I want to have set up all my base materials in Substance Painter, and will probably do some tweaks to my highpoly. My bakes turned out fine without too many errors, however I'll have to further smooth out the highpoly to better catch the highlights.

I'm looking forward to some 3 weeks of texturing and polish! My goal is to really push my texturing skills, so this will be interesting ;)

Thanks for reading, and I'll catch u next week for another update. Cheers!

Hi! I'm testing out this blog thing - Enjoy! :D

Finally got started on a new project:

I've wanted to make the FN Scar as a game-art project for some time now. My primary goal with this one is to expand my "material vocabulary" by exploring polymer and plastics, along with other modern-day weapon materials.

Progress so far:

In the first week, I'm about 80 percent done with the highpoly in Zbrush. I've planned for one more week to finish up the highpoly and start looking into the lowpoly - which should be feasible, considering that the only major parts remaining of the highpoly is to model a suitable scope and magazine.

My goal is to be able to spend the better part of three weeks on the texturing alone, as it is the main focus of the project.

Early reference board

Thanks for reading! I'll try to keep this blog updated about once every week. Cheers!