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M1911-A1 (first firearm)

Hey all, it's been quite a while but recently I picked up a project that I set aside a few years ago and wanted to get back into. This is the first firearm I've ever modeled, and I'm looking to see if I'm heading down the right track with it.

Current version:

n9mxOF3.jpg


ARCHIVE:

I took a lot of reference photos for this project, and I'll be sharing the entire collection soon. Here's my main ref:

wmPc0qi.jpg

Here's my high poly, minus a few tweaks to some of the side parts like the thumb safety:

g2ew2Cd.jpg
JoaPGxE.jpg
IYKU4pK.jpg
Amg8Gge.jpg
Feh6faN.jpg
dWlRuIt.jpg
ByY7uBS.jpg

I still have a number of backfaces to remove, but my low-poly is currently sitting at 2,311 polys:

WlQ1vVw.jpg
xlFWHgc.jpg
vLBow95.jpg

Any tips or critiques as I head into UVW'ing this sucker would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for looking!

Replies

  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    Nice choice of reference. Seems like everyone and their brother has done a 1911, but atleast this one has quite a few unique looking bis. So cool ref!

    Some tips:

    1. Your material for the high poly is a bit too glossy. It doesn't have a wide enough highlight to actually spread across the model and makes the edges and surface hard to read. I generally use a specular level of 50-70 and a gloss value of 20 or less. And generally a darker diffuse. This is a bit of preference, but something a bit darker and less glossy will help people crit the HP.

    2. Your high polies edges are fairly tight. Generally for baking the wider the edge you can make, the better. Wider isn't synonymous with soft, Though. A wider edge with a tight falloff will render a lot more information to the normal map rather than a realistically modeled edge. Maybe someone will post the racer realistic VS. Functional pic :)

    3. You will want to avoid Ngons on your low poly model. Those big faces on the side of the slide that have 10 + sides should be cut into smaller tris/quads. Your exporter or engine importer will triangulate a model regardless of your topology, But i can imagine strange things can happen when it tries to triangulate such a big ngon. Not to mention it could create some smoothing errors when you apply smoothing groups and go to bake. Could be wrong here. I've just made it a habit to stay away from ngons. You'll probably run into enough issues with tris and quads, So why not eliminate a variable.

    4. Prioritize where you want to spend geometry. It appears the holes in your trigger, for example, are pretty dense compared to some areas that will be more visible int he First person view. Sense your only at 2k, i wouldn't suggest optimizing that area, But maybe in the future spend more geometry on areas that will occupy more screen space in game.

    Overall its a good first weapon. Just some things to keep in mind for future projects, or this one if your willing to rework it a bit. Keep it up ! :thumbup:


    Edit: Sorry, I'll add some tips for moving forward to UVs and baking as per request.

    I would recommend reading these two threads:

    http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196

    http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154

    They are great learning tools for understanding baking and how projection and rendering to textures actually works.

    As for UV's. Give your UV islands a good amount of space from each other (padding). Use a hard edge every time you have a UV split. (see the Textools script for an easy way to generate SG's based on UV's) and try to mirror as many pieces that wont be visible at the same time. The grips, For example, You should never be able to see both of them at the same time on screen, So they can use the exact same texture space. This will save you time when texturing, and free up a lot of texture space.
  • Shrike
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    Shrike interpolator
    From a artistic viewpoint the model looks good

    Dont be afraid to use more polys, its good that you manage it with so few, but weapons are first person models and next gen will roughly have 5-6x your triscount. Rifles in COD use around 11k tris in MW3 as far as I know.
    Since you always only have one instance of a weapon rendered (since you only can have one at a time obviously)
    you could say that you have the same budget for any kind of weapon. But since the pistol is potentially 1 handed
    and can be wielded two times, and is a far more simple shape, Id go for roughly 50% of the triscount of a rifle.
    So you could go 5k for a pistol now easily (its not like Call of duty is the technical reference) and im sure
    next gen will go with around double of that.

    If you make your material so light, then make your background darker. Also avoid white to black gradients, they generally look bad. The one shot you rendered out has a better fitting shading and looks good and readable, while pretty low on contrast tho.

    metal can have a wide range of specular broadness and heights, but the one you took is the material definition of glass/fluids, extremely high and sharp.

    Also how about a hole in the barrel ? that 0.5 cm is not enough for a black texture to cover : P
  • 3DLee
    Really great advice here guys, I appreciate it!

    s620ex1, I think I actually just ran across that image from razer: http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=normal_edge_thickness.jpg

    I haven't collapsed most of my modeling stacks for the high poly, so I'm going to try and go back and add some wider edges. I'll also be sure to cut down of some of those ngons for sure.

    I was really on the fence about the holes in the trigger and the hammer - Far Cry 3's M1911 model actually has no holes and instead the texture is just white where they should be. This really stood out to me in that game though, and seeing I had the polys to spare I went for it. :)

    Shrike, I was actually aiming for almost a "last-gen" low poly - something that would work well in ARMA 2 for instance. Big thanks for the render tips as well: I went through and redid my viewport backgrounds. And yeah, I really need to model more of that barrel haha.

    I have a few things that are stumping me at the moment, and maybe you guys can help. I'm a bit rusty and I feel like I'm missing a few obvious things here, but anyway:

    When UV'ing, my planar projection isn't proportional and instead fills the squared off UV space when I project it. Is there a way to avoid this?

    ZkZADwB.jpg

    When doing a test bake, my low poly is showing up as it bleeds through the high holy on some of the curved surfaces. What am I doing wrong?

    iUnbCH1.jpg
    DvRybTg.jpg
  • joeriv
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    joeriv polycounter lvl 7
    On the right side of your screen in the UV options there is a checkbox called "normalize map", turn that off.
    Also if you are doing a flatten mapping or something similar, it will also give that option, always make sure that is turned off.

    Now it won't try to fit it in the box (and thus not squashing it to fit in there).

    And related to that (not causing it in this case, but I always do this to make sure nothing goes wrong) reset xform on all the pieces before unwrapping.
    (sometimes, for example if you used the scale tool on the primitive before converting it to editable poly it can cause things to not properly uv when doing a flatting mapping/projection).


    EDIT:
    Now that I look at it, your normal map colours are wrong.
    2 possible causes:
    -You are rendering your normal map in mental ray (put it to scanline)
    -Some weird material issue going on, make sure to put a completely standard material on everything, of the problem persists, export and reimport your lowpoly as .obj


    For the "artifacts":
    make sure to actually expand your cage so it covers the highpoly.

    Atm it seems as if you are basicly baking with a distance of 0 (looking at it, it gives problems where the HP is "over" the LP)

    In the projection modifier, at the bottom there is a "Push" setting, just push that up.
    There is also a checkbox called "Shaded", turn that on, it will give you clearer view if the cage is covering the highpoly.
    (small note here: Rendering to texture turns on "hardware shading", shaded cage only works with that off, a bit annoying, mentioning it in case that shaded option doesn't make a difference).
  • 3DLee
    Thanks joeriv, you hit the nail on the head with every question I had! I actually got everything uvmapped but then realized that I hadn't considered animation. So, I took some time to take new reference photos and remodel the frame and the slide, fixing some other small errors here and there (like the rear sight not being large enough or sitting correctly).

    Here's the updated model with the mag well, chamber, and barrel modeled and set to be animated:

    Fpgem38.jpg

    fSLKdoF.jpg

    ddYgWft.jpg

    Both models now function correctly, and everything fits where it's supposed to including the slide stop lever:

    Ma3z12A.jpg

    iPKUwAI.jpg

    And after all of that remodeling I couldn't resist trying it out:

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYRFYW-fViM"]Firing & cycling of an M1911-A1 Tactical (high polygon 3D animation test) - YouTube[/ame]

    Next I'll be diving back into the UV maps once again.
  • joeriv
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    joeriv polycounter lvl 7
    Glad to see that that fixed your problems.

    Just some small issues, mostly pincing, I'm not saying this to be annoying :p but just if you would fix these it would go from a "okay-ish" to "that is looking nice" model.

    Red= pinching/weirdness
    Green= Watch your edge widths, those are the biggest offenders.
    Green 1) This area seems a bit sloppy
    green 2) Seems like it's missing the hole for the trigger to go in?

    vdmj.jpg

    And another thing, I couldn't figure out why this area was a bit weird, but quickly googling, the spacing between the gun and the grip thing is almost completely even while yours is very narrow at the bottom and getting wider towards the top.

    65py.jpg
  • tonyd927
    Looks better than mine! haha and it's your first.

    No crits really, other than the hammer, it looks kinda "fake" maybe stick to the original hammer?

    and the rear sights are a bit large :)
  • 3DLee
    @joeriv - Really appreciate the paint-over, super helpful! I was digging through the wiki yesterday and I can't find a good guide on how to avoid pinching. Some parts of sub-D modeling still escape me, and "best practices" to avoid pinching is one of those areas.

    Here's a look at the wires for my take-down notch cut. Both attempts to avoid pinching failed, although my cuts on the second image seemed to result in less pinching:

    RJsNIV4.jpg

    htb2GP6.jpg

    I feel like I could probably get a nice normal bake off of this model as-is, but I've already poured so much time into I might as well get it right and learn a few things along the way. :)

    @tonyd927 - All of the 1911's I've ever fired have been modern versions with the "commander" style hammer like I've modeled here, so the classic "spur" style hammer actually looks weird to me, haha. Believe it or not I actually downsized the rear sight a little compared to the actual real-life monstrosity: ZeHoTQH.jpg
  • SaferDan
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    SaferDan polycounter lvl 14
    Hey dude these wires should sort out your pinching, just connect the green lines up to the next line, I assume this will be ok but I cant see whats up there :P

    also delete that red line, will make the smoothing weird! and the blue lines will make that bevel harder but again I didn't know if that's what you wanted :P


    wires_zpse444549e.png
  • tonyd927
    3DLee wrote: »

    @tonyd927 - All of the 1911's I've ever fired have been modern versions with the "commander" style hammer like I've modeled here, so the classic "spur" style hammer actually looks weird to me, haha. Believe it or not I actually downsized the rear sight a little compared to the actual real-life monstrosity: ZeHoTQH.jpg


    oh wow, then yes your model looks spectacular! haha :)
  • 3DLee
    After a foolish amount of re-work, I've finally solved 97.89% of the pinching & stretching issues. It took much longer than I expected, but I learned a lot about how edge loops control the high poly, and after all, isn't learning new things the whole point of this? :) Really looking forward to diving back into the low poly & texture!

    uqEoEtH.jpg
  • Shrike
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    Shrike interpolator
    Good progress, but wait with the bake, that thing on the side looks Really off
    (no idea what its called, left of the top grip screw)
    If you compare the reference above and your screen, it is very different, and looks very odd aswell right now
  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    It's called the safety :) Controls whether the gun goes pew pew or not.
  • DWalker
    Actually, that's the slide release; the safety is to the right (or more properly, behind) the top grip screw.
  • s6
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    s6 polycounter lvl 10
    I thought he was mistaken on the side he meant. Slide release seems fine to me, The safety is what appears fairly odd to me...

    Edit: And now looking at it, I remember my initial take of what was "left" of the top grip screw, I was looking at the left shot. So it would be the safety.

    edit edit: And knowing Shrike comes from a design background, I know he's not likely talking front/back/left/right in terms of object space, But rather, screen space. :)
  • Shrike
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    Shrike interpolator
    sda.png

    thats what I meant

    I would delete the whole part on the gun itself, make it flat again and put it as separate geometry on top, then merge it down
    so you have a lot more control and the real life thing is "attached" aswell anyways

    Is it the safety control ? I wasnt sure, dont know much about small firearms
  • 3DLee
    @Shrike - That would be the thumb safety. It locks the slide into place along with the hammer, and in this A1 model actually moves a small firing pin block into place inside of the slide. This allows the pistol to be safety carried with a round in the chamber and the hammer cocked, which is important for the 1911 as it won't fire unless the hammer is in fact cocked. :)

    Good call on the weird shape of my high-poly on that part. It was the first piece of floating geometry I added and it was way off. I went ahead and just redid it entirely! :thumbup: So, total updates for this round:

    • Remodeled the thumb safety to better match my ref (thanks Shrike!)
    • Re-modeled the slide serrations that I forget to add back on
    • Modeled a hole in the frame to hold the trigger
    • Fixed the angle of the rear sight cut to be a correct 45 degree angle cut instead of a straight cut into the slide, and edited the rear sight to match
    • Added a screw and some floating geo to the rear sight to allow for some white dots to be textured on
    • Fixed 1.2 bajillion small mesh errors and points of pinching
    • Fixed the alignment of the grips with the rear of the frame

    g0j1aDX.jpg

    IFZBDvv.jpg

    RdZTJQB.jpg
  • Mr Digital
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    Mr Digital polycounter lvl 8
    Nice results, a few issues with the normal but is not important, i wanna see the diffuse more dark, and watch how the highlight (specular) goes around the bake.
  • 3DLee
    I've been finishing up the UVWs on the low poly and I'm having an issue with TexTools. After applying a UVW Unwrap on all of the selected objects, the "normalize" option in TexTools doesn't do anything. Packing works just fine though. Am I doing something wrong?

    WNHjRtC.jpg

    Normalize = no changes

    Rk9UhT0.jpg

    Packing = works fine

    PqtB9AO.jpg
  • Free_Fall
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    Free_Fall polycounter lvl 8
    If you're planning on using that for you're unwrap you might want to look over it again.. I can already see parts that got a different size compared to other parts. Also you might want to look into the tiny parts, to join them to make somewhat bigger islands of mapping shiz..
  • 3DLee
    Yeah it's definitely just my initial grouping of the UVWs, I haven't started packing it yet. I was hoping to make use of the "normalize" option to get things a bit closer to the size they should be, but it's not working.

    I've been following this excellent tutorial, and his normalize works just fine:

    http://youtu.be/y_1ql8yH2Ow?t=27m33s
  • Stoy79
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    Stoy79 polycounter lvl 3
    You can use the “rescale elements” tool from the UV editor window (it’s in the “arrange elements” section) instead. It does pretty much the same thing and works in pretty much the same way. Just make sure that all seams that need to be welded are before applying it.
  • 3DLee
    Thanks Stoy!

    I had a few hours of manual packing thanks to all of my bits of internal parts that I wanted to be at a much lower pixel density, but I think my UVW is pretty close to done:

    b4S9yQ1.jpg

    ElTGuPP.jpg

    uWi1066.jpg
  • Pedro Amorim
    Lots of wasted space there.
    For starters, I would mirror the right side as much as you can. Also, if you merged the grip onto the main mesh you could have one big chunk of uv. Right now you have the grip on the texture as a separete island and the part where it sits is another uv island as well. Meaning that the sll that texture space where the grip sits on the side is being wsted, because its going to be hidden when the grip goes on top.
    Not sure if im being clear.
  • 3DLee
    Just merged the grip UVs with the frame - that saved a ton of space, thanks! :)

    How much can I mirror on the frame/slide? Looking at my ref there will be some unique text on both sides of the frame, and I'm wondering how the slide stop, mag release, and other small side parts will effect the AO.
  • Pedro Amorim
    Just think of the type of animation this weapon will have. Will you ever see the other side?
    In most cases you don't, so you can safely mirror both sides. :)
  • 3DLee
    I decided to leave both sides separate with the intention of doing some unique detailing, and I wanted to show my progress since the last post so you guys can let me know if I've gone astray with my workflow.

    I set up a separate bake scene in Max and pulled all moveable parts away from each other. My first attempts at baking were terrible, but after going back and triangulating my low poly about 90% of the errors fixed themselves:

    bLzNKEr.jpg
    ONgOewA.jpg

    Here's the best bake I've gotten so far: http://i.imgur.com/RTiSy1E.jpg

    I'm getting just enough streaking on the rounded parts of the slide to be noticeable, and I can't figure out if it's coming from my low poly or my high poly. You can see some of the streaking here:

    9eJSvRv.jpg

    Other than the streaking the bake seems to be coming together OK:

    IcFG24b.jpg

    I'm also noticing some strange issues with the hammer, the trigger guard, and the right thumb safety. It's like those faces are reversed on the low poly, but I've tripled check them all and they look fine in 3ds max, but after the export, they look reversed.

    fuMQaSx.jpg
  • KnechtRuprecht
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    KnechtRuprecht polycounter lvl 6
    Try to flip the normals and rebake. That should fix the shading errors.
    And yeah the streaks on the top are from your HP Mesh.
  • 3DLee
    Thanks Knecht, I managed to find a few areas of flipped normals that solved a few of my bake issues, but I kept getting really strange geometry issues on my low poly OBJ export, even with nothing but the bare model. Finally I realized that the sections that were freaking out needed their xform reset. Doh.

    It also turns out that the streaks in the slide are coming from my low poly, not my high. Something about the smoothing groups/shading on the low poly is not wanting to cooperate, but I think I've been able to fix it or at least overwhelm it by tweaking the final bake in Photoshop.

    Speaking of which, I finally have a decent looking bake with some custom Photoshop detailing as well:

    Current polys/tris: 3996/4611

    ZqctpSH.jpg

    j3ZzRoX.jpg

    Trying to fix that shading error on the muzzle... I think I have some triangles that are just too close:

    AnUjvKX.jpg

    I'm also considering redoing my low poly grip screws to have a few more sides are they're kind of standing out right now:

    AgbQjfQ.jpg

    NgFInNg.jpg

    urWIYan.jpg

    Kff2Vbg.jpg

    And thanks to last month's remodel there's a full interior that allows for full animation of reloading and slide lock-back:

    jwh6UAu.jpg

    mtbCWHR.jpg

    ebkuylF.jpg
  • 3DLee
    After hearing so much about Quixel's tools I've been digging into them this weekend. The good part: They amazing. The bad part: Instead of saving time now I want to keep playing with adding more detail. :)

    I decided to change my grip reference to a nice pair that I picked up for a friend's M1911 a few weeks back - they're absolutely beautiful rosewood:

    4kAgFOt.jpg

    I did leave the original style grips screws while increasing their poly count seeing they're so prominent. Along with changing the grips I've continued to fix small normal map errors while adding detail to the magazine, the .45 ACP brass, etc:

    dfO1rVm.jpg

    lMvSwRW.jpg


    WltITnU.jpg
  • 3DLee
    Really enjoying working with nDo! Here's my texture after a few days of work:

    Og8eRh0.jpg

    KSwavmm.jpg

    dU3Ly17.jpg

    piEaHUS.jpg
  • 3DLee
    I fixed some sync issues across the diffuse/spec maps and painted in some holster wear like my original ref. I think it's almost time to call this one complete!

    KRHpA1w.jpg

    PAPzvJj.jpg
  • Stoy79
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    Stoy79 polycounter lvl 3
    Very good model and textures. :)
    Just two ideas for improving it further - First thing is the wear seems too blurred and too bright (at least the most visible one). I think it would look much better if you sharpen it a bit and make it a lot less visible in the diffuse. What I usually do, when painting metal, is blurring the cavity mask and then, apply an exposure layer over it, with gamma set to a very low value (like 0,05- 0,10) and increase exposure, until the edges stand out as white and the rest is black (may need to increase the contrast quite a bit, below the exposure layer). Then use it as a mask to highlight the edges in the spec map. Usually it creates a quite convincing wear effect. Of course, it needs to be further improved with brushes and stuff.
    Second thing is the screws on the grip - I wouldn't have made them geometry but would have baked them in the normal map instead. Not that it looks bad, it's just that it isn't necessary, in my opinion. In first person, these would be covered by the hands meshes, so it's a bit of a waste of polygons. Also, in your reference, these screws are recessed in the wood, so it would look just as good in the normal map. Anyway, just my opinion.
    But, again, it's a very good model, so thumbs up! :thumbup: :)
  • 3DLee
    Hey, thanks for the critiques Stoy79, much appreciated! :) Some of the last wear I added was attempting to replicate this interesting holster wear but I may have blurred it too much - I'll definitely keep your method in mind for the future:

    L9mncl2.jpg

    I'm glad I kept the screws seeing it's a portfolio piece, but you're right, realistically there was really no need to not bake them into the grip texture as on most 1911's they don't really stick out that far.

    After fixing a few other small issues I think I'm going to call this complete:

    UBls28g.jpg

    V8JUpat.jpg

    xZzwKe3.jpg

    rujD7a6.jpg

    UHLgF5c.jpg
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