17th Century French Flintlock Pistol
polycounter lvl 10
UPDATE:
ORIGINAL POST:
Hey, fellow Polycounters!
Seen here, is an antique flintlock pistol that I am currently working on. I have designed it to be very ornate with many of its silver features mirroring French designs from the 17th century. I threw-in a few fleur-de-lis' for good measure!
On the very bottom portion of the handle, will be a gargoyle-esque head, which seems to have been popular at the time. I have deliberately obscured it from these shots as it is currently at a very early stage.
The guns are supposed to be in good condition with some gunk and blemishes making a subtle appearance on the silver components. The wood is going to be ever-so-slightly beaten-up too.
So far, I have only modelled/sculpted the high-poly models, which were originally made in Maya using NURBS before bringing into ZBrush.
Constructive criticism is both welcome and encouraged. Thanks!
ORIGINAL POST:
Hey, fellow Polycounters!
Seen here, is an antique flintlock pistol that I am currently working on. I have designed it to be very ornate with many of its silver features mirroring French designs from the 17th century. I threw-in a few fleur-de-lis' for good measure!
On the very bottom portion of the handle, will be a gargoyle-esque head, which seems to have been popular at the time. I have deliberately obscured it from these shots as it is currently at a very early stage.
The guns are supposed to be in good condition with some gunk and blemishes making a subtle appearance on the silver components. The wood is going to be ever-so-slightly beaten-up too.
So far, I have only modelled/sculpted the high-poly models, which were originally made in Maya using NURBS before bringing into ZBrush.
Constructive criticism is both welcome and encouraged. Thanks!
Replies
All parts shown here will be silver with correct metalness/roughness values (assuming I can find them).
basic forms look good, case is nice. but work on the renders, the light seems a little too bright.
Good point. The last two are particularly washed-out. I will bear this in mind for next time.
The relatively high edge-loop density is to help DX11's RT-Tessellation maintain equal polygon distribution.
For the presentation, though, you could use more neutral angles and cleaner separation of main model vs. box vs. the far background. Because the strength is in the details here and they kind of get lost in the chaos. Little details can't stand a fight with such strong dynamics of the background, of compositon.
narticus, I agree with, and appreciate your words. I should point-out though that the wood is supposed to have a speckled grain. Perhaps I haven't effectively conveyed the speckles, given that you considered them to be dirt. Thanks.
"I am now creating the low-poly geometry. There has got to be a better technique than this for retopologising hard-surface objects."
If it doesn't need polyflow then try the ZBrush Decimation Master plugin - works a treat!
Good job!
\\BlkOps, I did want to use decimation master, but DX11 real-time tessellation requires clean topology with evenly distributed edge-loops.
Hi AirmanEpic! I will gladly explain my process; I hope it helps.
After conducting some research and developing a good idea of the direction I wanted to go in, I began fleshing-out a rough model of the gun in 3DS Max, paying special attention to the silhouette and fundamental shape. Due to the complex curvature of certain parts of the gun (such as the hammer and various decorative patterns), it was necessary to adopt a NURBS modelling approach (mostly bi-rails) on some parts. All NURBS surfaces were created in Maya before being converted into polygons and brought back into 3DS Max. I opted for Maya due to my dislike of Max's NURBS tool-set. NURBS aren't used that frequently in game art workflows, but I enjoy the precision they bring to the table.
With the entire model now in one scene file, I exported it from Max in OBJ format and brought it into ZBrush for cleanup and detailing. The first thing I did in ZBrush was convert everything into a dynamesh and bond certain overlapping meshes together so as to create complex contours in the wood and metal.
After cleaning up the mesh, I used spotlight and some alpha brushes to add detail. The floral pattern to the barrel was created following the following methodology:
thanks a lot for the detailed tutorial. I'm working on a model in the same vein and I wonder - how did you create the floral relief? Did you google it or drew it in PS by hand?
The floral relief pattern is the only photo-derived part of the gun. I dropped into the Royal Armouries while visiting Leeds a few months ago, and seized the opportunity to get some nice photo-reference.
I began by extracting a single diamond shape (containing a subset of flowers) from the photograph and used Photoshop's transform tools to correct for perspective distortion. After ensuring the diamond would repeat across the barrel in an aesthetically pleasing manner, I painted on top of it with 0-255 height values.
The relief pattern is therefore somewhat of a hybrid, originating from a photo but receiving a lot of hand painted love too.
The gloss map used the 'Mask by Smoothness' and 'Mask by Cavity' masking options in order to create the impression of grime, blemishes and exposed metal after the displacement had been applied.
Another strategy I sometimes use is to import the displacement map into ZBrush as a regular texture and then select the 'Mask by Colour' --> 'Mask by Intensity' masking option. This enables precise placement of the pattern while being free to sculpt the pattern into the surface of the ZTool using whatever brush you desire.
@AirmanEpic
Using NURBS was a matter of personal taste more-so than anything else. I wanted to convey a very particular curvature for the hammer, feur-de-lis, and various decorative elements; machined parts typically have complex yet smooth contours and a NURBS approach can capture this well. You could use ZBrush/MODO/etc and achieve similar results should you desire to, but NURBS, for me, are faster and more precise.
My use of the word, 'cleanup,' certainly was quite ambiguous, and I used it in two different contexts ― let me expand.
In my first usage of the term, I was referring to fixing some of the anomalies that had occurred after applying dynamesh's union add algorithm to bond several meshes together. Anomalies frequently seems to occur in ZBrush when using dynamesh. I usually mend these areas using the trim and polish brushes.
Later, I used it to mean correcting the low-poly model's topology. ZBrush's retopology tool is reasonably good, but it does come with a few drawbacks. One of which is that, when trying to select a vertex, it is very easy to inadvertently create a new vertex right next to the original. This leads to incomplete faces and 'doubles' (two vertices in the same place). Repeat this mistake enough times, and you have a topological nightmare! I had a few such misplaced vertices and missing faces in my low-poly model, and so used 3DS Max's weld to remove the doubles, and functions such as bridge and extrude to instate the missing faces.
I hope that was helpful.