Prop Modeling Project resubmission

The alterations in the blog post for the re submission are shown in red, many images near the red text are also new.
I changed the date on the blog post so online it shows up as the lates post making it easy to find.

For the triple A modeling task I have chosen to model the polish anti tank rifle WZ 35, this weapon has multiple different materials and is not too difficult or too easy to make.

One of the first things I needed to do was to gather any reference images, this was difficult because the gun does not have too many clear images where the weapon is fully visible, I did however stumble upon the above images which clearly show the features and overall shape of the rifle.

For this project I will be making a model that will resemble a newly built rifle shown in the image below, when it is time to texture the model in Quixel I will use a light creamy wood for the stock and painted metal for the barell, while pieces like the metal plate on the back of the stock will be painted blue.

For the Maya build I will be working from the side layout drawing I found, comparing it to other images of the rifle it is obvious that this drawing presents the rifle layout well and will allow me to work accurately.

I begun the build by making the barrel of the rifle and the stability legs and then proceeded to build the body.

Initially I started the stock with a primitive cube, but it quickly became apparent that this wasnt going to work.

The body was made from a cube was then extruded to cover the basic shape of the rifle, after I build the basic body I extruded the bottom and top to make the rounded shape of the rifle, however because of the shape and ammount of vertices it became difficult to control the model.

This made it difficult to keep the upper front of the gun flat while making the back rounded.

The barrel was the easiest part since all I had to do was reshape and extrude a primitive cylinder to match the shape of the rifles barrel.

The holes in the exit side of the barrel was a little tricky when I came to this point, what I did was deform a primitive cylinder and use Boolean difference to carve out the shape of the hole, but now the mesh was messed up and could cause problems later on in the build, this is there the insert edge loop and multi-cut tolls became very useful, I Inserted extra edges and fixed the topology of the object.

The part of the gun that held the legs together was made separately to make the texturing easier.

While making the barrel I saw that I should start over on the wood stock since the current ones structure is messy and still has jagged areas where it should be smooth.

The easiest part of the build were the trigger and ammo clip as they were just simple squares extruded and had the vertices moved into the right places.

Selected above are the 3 objects I feel like they should be rebuild: the gun stock parts and the firing mechanism, I revised the method I used to make the stock and in order to build it properly I used a cylinder to make the new gun stock, I started from the back and deformed the cylinder so it would take on the shae of the stock better, this made it easier to form the stock as well.

The front of the stock was simply made flat at the top with the selection of multiple vertices, comparing the new to the old it was a drastic improvement.

And comparing it to the first try I was much happier with the second attempt, I followed this up by mirroring the stock in the +Y angle and removed some of the faces and reshaped the new object into the upper part of the gun stock, I applied some basic test textures to see how the gun would look and I am very please with this progress.

To follow up the new gun stock I re created the firing mechanism from scratch.

After loading the model into Zbrush through separate pieces I used noise to create wood grain on the stock of the gun, the noise tool was very helpful with this and in order to make this process easier I divided the gun pieces into separate poly groups and applied the noise seperately.

After exporting the high polygon version of the gun I used dyna mesh to merge the object together and decimated the model to a stage where it retained the basic shape of the gun so that I could take it to maya and produce the low polygon model and prepare it for Xnormal baking.

On the decimated model I produced a quad draw of the gun and used that as the low poly model.

After finishing the low poly version I went over it to fix the mesh topology by straightening the vertices on the object and making sure the object keeps its form.

I added the aim sights since they were missing from the om the low poly.

I also noticed that there were some extra vertices that could be joined to other ones, these must have come up during the straightening of the object, this was my first time making a full quad drawn object, a problem like this was expected.

After fixing up the model I moved to the unwrapping, and changed the size and orientation of many pieces, the main piece being the stock had to be oriented in the way seen below, this was done so that when the object is textured in quixel the wooden grain on the texture would follow the model correctly.

The smooth UV tool was also very helpful as it relaxed the UV pieces correctly preventing stretching in the textures on the model.

Final Build

At this point I wanted to fix the direction of the wood grain and the two metal bolts that were on the sides of the stock, I returned to the low poly maya model and rotated the textures clockwise by 90 degrees and added two dots to the new colour map.

The map was baked in maya to ease the process of texturing in quixel.

I produced a few different version of the gun for presentation purposes, and in the end followed the brief and making the newly built gun.

Creating the material to apply to the gun model was simple enough, each texture was named appropietly and easy enough to drag and drop.

Getting used to unreal did take me a moment, the controls are different to the unity editor with which I am more familiar with.

In the end I am quite happy with the outcome of the project, during the time of the build I learn many things about the programs I used and learnt to use more of their features to produce better work.