Final project pt. 3 - Highpoly/Lowpoly progress/First bake attempt

So.... I brought the gun into Zbrush for some polishing, and brought almost all of it to a nice polished bevel. I made a low poly from the midpoly I had already made in Blender, and it came out to around 27k triangles. I did manage to make very rudimentary UVs for the time being, they are functional but are pretty awful looking so I am not showing them here. I plan on fixing them up to get better texel density and better coverage across the UDIM space before industry review this Thursday.

This is how the first bake has come out:



It's more difficult to see from a distance but there are tons of AO errors in here, and there's bake skew going on with the screw and boolean floaters I have placed. Some areas of the low poly also don't quite match the high poly/need more topology. The polish seemed to bake on pretty well though! :]

As for how the final high poly has come out, this is how it looks so far:

I've also updated my reference board some, I've decided to aim towards a specific style shown in Valorant. It's a more toony style and will involve a little bit of shader work/painting, but it should be fun to try to replicate. 

Artstation link that has a video of the skin line in game

Schedule:

Week 3 (21st - 28th):

- Low poly done ✓
- UVs done ✓
- 1st bake made ✓
*These are all technically done and I did what I had on my schedule, but they are not to the quality I want them to be. 

Final project pt. 2 - Highpoly progress

Here is my high poly so far, it's not fully polished as of yet as some booleans haven't been finalized, and there's some shading errors on the model, but visually mostly everything is on the gun now.




Special thanks to a couple of my friends who pointed out that one area of the gun didn't make sense, and suggested putting something akin to a Magpul sight in that spot. I also had quite the struggle trying to figure out how the handle on the stock works, but I've got the shape of it down at least. I may deviate slightly from my original plan and take the gun into Zbrush to add a nice polish all over it, but I need to make sure all of my topology is finalized first. Overall I am a bit more behind on my high poly than I would have liked to have been, but there shouldn't be too much further to go.

Slightly updated ref board:



Schedule:

Week 2 (14th - 21st):

- High poly finished (moved to week 3)
- Texture references gathered

Final project pt. 1 - Planning/Blockout

Here's the wireframe of the gun, some parts are lower poly than others at the moment as I jumped forward into the high poly a bit, the triangle count is just over 55k.


Shot w/o wireframe:


Here is how the gun looks while overlaid over the concept art:


And additionally the gun scaled with Manny:


Here is my reference board so far:

Last but not least.... this is my project plan written out:

Week 1 (7th -14th):
- References gathered and ref board started
- Blockout finished
- high poly started (not using Zbrush, will be using mainly Blender to add bevels and subdivs)

Week 2 (14th - 21st):
- Texture references gathered
- High poly finished

Week 3 (21st - 28th):
- Low poly done 

- UVs done
- 1st bake made

Week 4 (28th - 30th) quarter week:
- Texture polish if possible
- Renders made

3D - Hardsurface pt. 3

For this last chunk of the project, I worked on making alphas and setting up some areas of the gun for the engravings I wanted to make. Unfortunately I didn't get as far as I would have liked with the engravings, so I likely will continue later on, ideally with some stencils of my own as well. For this section I utilized stencils of cybersigilism tattoos online, making alphas from images I gathered in order to save time. Additionally, I've fixed most of the shading/pinching issues I had in the last turn in.

3D - Hardsurface pt. 2

For this section I finalized some parts on the gun and added a couple of new ones, as well as added more detail to the cylinder. I then took it into Zbrush and used a mixture of creasing, subdivision, dynamesh, and polish to try and give it micro bevels. The alphas stamped on there are just testing to see if they would work, and what tweaking I may need to do in the future. I would like to do some form of a floral engraved design.

3D - Hardsurface blockout

For this project I decided to utilize a tutorial from a guy named Tim Bergholz (aka Chamferzone). He creates what looks to be a more tactical/modern version of a 357 magnum. I followed what he created for the most part, but kept some parts more basic in order to make sculpting on the gun easier. He also creates attachments for the gun in the video, such as a picatinny rail on the top, I also elected not to make that.

Here's how my blockout has turned out so far, some things are still a rough blockout, and the cylinder is still missing some detail, but most parts are solid.







These are also some of the references that were provided, with exact measurements as well:

3D - Textures/Final Renders

After learning quite a bit last week from Nitin's lighting workshops, I decided to apply that work to my renders of my wasp boio for this round. I also made a easy post process material for this round that creates an outline around the mesh. Here are my final shots:






Here's a shot in completely neutral lighting as well:


And here's a shot using Painter's Iray: