Nice clean modeling. Everything looks like it could use a light zbrush pass. I'm not talking heavy denting and destruction but just some slight knicks and warping. Metals look really nice if you take the inflate brush in zbrush and alt-brush on some of the flat areas and brush on some of the edges, if you do it soft enough it'll add just an interesting imperfection to the highlight. In addition to some subtle knicks it'll make the surface feel more real.
Really nice modeling! I can't wait to see more! Is there a chance that you can post wires?
Also. It seems like you may need to tigthten a few bevels. The other thing I would suggest is thay you change the direction and the intensity of theligth. Rigth now is blowing your spec away and not really defining your topology.
Nice models, the spaz 12 looks very clean though I don't like those bent tubes. I see references suggest the same result as you have determined, yet I feel this detracts from the rest of the nice detailling.
On a side note, your renders look grainy, it's especially noticable on the vault door. Try upping samples using Hammersly @ 1.0 quality, or use the mental ray ao shader which imo is a much quicker and better solution for high poly presentation.
Here's the setup I use for mray link no lights required!
JordanW: yeah thats def something thats been missing from my workflow...havent dabbled a lot in zbrush to add that final level detailing, but I could definitely see it improving the vault thats for sure.
Raul: sure
with the light, I have only 1 spot with an intensity of 1.06......I think whats making it seem intense is I adjusted the brightness/contrast levels of the renders in photoshop after the fact...too strong hun? and curious which bevels you think could use tightening. There are a couple here n there I purposely left looser in the case that when I bake it down it will read a little better...just looking at them now I would say the bevels for the holes in the heat sink are a bit looser than they actually are.
I remember when you first did that vault..It looked good then and still looks good. It would definitely be sick to see it textured but Uving would certainly cause you to commit suicide.
If thats what you mean, I kind of like the touch of the shoulder harness thing...Ive seen a few other spas's out there, all of them without it except for the one in left 4 dead 2. I think it gives it a little more personality even tho you probably wouldnt leave it in there like that if you were to use the gun.
and the grain... again, was added in photoshop...I think also whats not helping is the jpeg compression from imageshack where theyre hosted. =/ the uncompressed ones look better, but thanks for critique
Yes those, it's a personal choice thing
I didn't know you added grain, not sure why either but apart from that the shadows on the vault aren't good quality. The model makes up for this but why lose clarity when you don't have to?
yeah....I know its funny but I kind of like the grain/blurry shadows, its a personal artistic aesthetic I guess you could say. I guess I can try to find a happy medium somewhere...
Anyways...I took the vault door into zbrush and gave it some detailing....not a lot of damage but just enough to add some interest. Thanks Jordan, I think its a nice touch and wise decision to do a lil zbrushing pass
wow amazing how fast thread get bumped these days....
anyways, ..I just took the spas into zbrush and I dont know how noticeable it is in these renders but there are a few knicks here n there...kind of hard to add in the right amount of imperfections without going overboard and giving the form the impression of stone or something other than a weapons material...but I think these turned out nicely, spent yesterday browsing/downloading textures and figuring out how to get some nice anti aliasing in zbrush
ps I think I'm gonna get started on this:
the an-94 or some other variant of the AK...theres I think a zillion of them out there
Hey man the new renders looks sweet. The zbrush details are rather hard to notice but thats probably ok since like you said, its better to not go too far with it and end up with a stone look. Good luck with the next gun, it looks like it should be a pretty fun one to do.
Eric: try out dropbox as an alternative image hosting, its really easy and never resizes/recompresses your stuff. I usually do like jpeg 11(ELEVENNNNN) and end up with 600kb images and it handles it just fine, its not like people are on 56k or anything.
sh*t...thanks, yeah I dunno whats going on here with imageshack, they might come back but on but I'll move em over to drropbox soon
edit. alright there we go, I relinked all the main images from dropbox and resaved them at maximum quality, so now theres very little if any noticeable artifacts.
alright update time....just finished the AK magazine here...u just gotta fuckin love that chunky, more curved 7.62mm mag. I think I'll probably do another variation just to swap em out and see what looks better
This is rendered in ZBrush, right? Never realized it'd be a good idea to render out high poly meshes in ZBrush even with no sculpted details. Matcaps for the win.
just an update on progress from this weekend, going to do the regular plastic hand-grip but I came across this neat one with a heat-sink I think its called and some rails
hey thanks kelv...someone should, they really should.
thanks also robster...yeah theyre pretty much standard setting, all I did was set the background res to double size then sized it down with AA half, changed the bg to solid black and turned on some perspective.
here I'll leave this here, will post more tomorrow.
The AK is look great Eric! I love how its not the standard one you see every day. Seen a lot of AK's but this is the first one I have seen that looks like this beyond the photo ref you linked.
Very nice, very clean models on both the AK and Spas, although I think that bar thing looks silly its just my opinion and I know they have them in real life so it makes sense.
Looking really great! Im curious as to how you went about the mag.. did you model everything oriented perfectly straight and then deform it, or did you model all the detail when it was already bent?
Beartraps for the magazine I did not use any deformers. I modeled the main shape how it is actually curved and then the grooved raised parts separately and just eyeballed it
ok sorry for not updating sooner, had a lot of work to do around the house, laundry, shopping, cleaning etc....plus Been hunting for jobs a lot so thats been taking up a lot of my time. Anyways, I decided to make the stock a folding one, and to add the optics mount on the other side after some crits from Racer, which you can see in this picture below. I think Im going to get started on the low poly and bake this bastard down. Wish me luck
ty Racer appreciate, and thanks for the suggestion for the stock, it does look better I agree
Lauren hmm I guess I could do some renders later within max, but I want to minimize time on rendering thats why Im just plopping it into zbrush and using screen grabs essentially
ps. looking at your site, I love your Ital Design Cala. That used to be one of my fav cars after playing need for speed 2
Zbrush? Does that mean you sculpt it? Or do you just use it for the nice realtime materials? Because you can get those in Max too, with the Matballz DirectX shader (it works fine on highpoly, it's really light). It's easier than Zbrush even; Load shader, pick matball, grab viewport. I can explain more if needed.
And thanks man, they don't make games and cars like those anymore...
Zbrush? Does that mean you sculpt it? Or do you just use it for the nice realtime materials? Because you can get those in Max too, with the Matballz DirectX shader (it works fine on highpoly, it's really light). It's easier than Zbrush even; Load shader, pick matball, grab viewport. I can explain more if needed.
edit:I used that at work to "render" (animation > make preview) a highpoly 360° animation of a car's components exploding and coming back together, worked fine for 2m tri's on a shitty laptop.
Zbrush? Does that mean you sculpt it? Or do you just use it for the nice realtime materials? Because you can get those in Max too, with the Matballz DirectX shader (it works fine on highpoly, it's really light). It's easier than Zbrush even; Load shader, pick matball, grab viewport. I can explain more if needed.
And thanks man, they don't make games and cars like those anymore...
yeah I'm using it mainly for the realtime shader... for presentation purposes. n Thanks for the link, I had no idea there were such mat's for max. Sure if you could explain more that would be nice.
also, Ok I just dl'ed the mats from the Peppi's post in that link, how do I go abouts loading it up?
Hey good stuff man, I caught it in the WAYWO thread. Really good crisp stuff, means a lot when you're working with firearms.
Personally I like to try and exclude any airsoft ref whenever possible, though I understand especially dealing with some more esoteric Russian hardware it's not exactly the easiest stuff to get good ref on. The trouble with modeling off airsoft is that your finished piece becomes a copy of a copy, but you knew that so I won't preach.
Sorry that you're in Canada because while Canucks can have guns too it's a whole lot more restricted that for us in the US. A decent Romanian AK will only run Americans about 400 dollars, and a spam can of 1080 rounds of 5.45x39mm is only another 140 dollars more or so. Lot easier to model something accurately when you hold one in your hands. Just sayin'
ah thanks Felipe, and Gauss yeah thats pretty much how I feel. 400 dollary-doo's, seriously? Is that for an airsoft or the real thing? If its for the real thing thats an amazing price! I read tho some AK's and even AR's can run upwards of a few grand, is that true?
Yeah, it's not all that different from cars in that respect. You can get something a little older that will work very well most of the time, certainly well enough for a range toy, for 5-800 dollars of most long-arms and rifles that most people are interested in. A decent, basic 1911 will go for 400 dollars or so.
But then, as with cars, there are people who want extreme levels of performance. Either because it's their job and they want to squeeze every ounce out of the platform while reducing chance of failure or error, or maybe they're using it for competition. Or they just have a lot of money. So while you can get a very cool retro Vietnam-style AR-15 build for about 6-700 dollars (and I'm told build one for about this price as well), once you get into premium stuff--that both looks nicer cosmetically and (generally) works better too, you can go north of 2000 USD very quickly. Same for the 1911: the way the gun is you can have a perfectly capable one at 400 dollars, but the kind of 1911 you get for 2000 dollars is a unearthly dream by comparison.
The Bushmaster ACR just got released and the entry-level pricetag is $2,400. But hey, it's so next gen.
Very cool looking AK EricV. I dig it. I own an Arsenal SGL21 which looks very similiar to this except I don't have the folding stock. Gauss is right when you can hold the gun in your hands you can model it with so much more confidence lol. Also about the price tags he is right again haha. I own a Rock Island 1911 which I purchased for 400 bucks and it shoots just as straight as a Kimber which is about 1000. I also owned the cheaper AK he said about 400 which was a romanian WASR and I sold it to get the Arsenal SGL21. I soon will definately model my gun aswell lol.
The only thing I could say is maybe take a look at the muzzle breaks. The style of gun your making looks to me exactly like an Arsenal SLR 107 series. I dont know if that is what you were looking to immitate or not but I would maybe change the muzzle break from a slant break to something that looks like this.
Also if you keep the slant break I would take a look at more AK's with slant breaks. They usually dont look up like that. They are tilted to the side. Other than that it looks pretty damn good. I would check the back of the stock too how it is smaller compared to the reciever. The stock is normally the same size as the reciever even if it is a folder. I can find more pictures if you want me to.:poly124:
oh shoot sorry I didnt know there were any more replies here, did not know you commented Krazy. I started this new job and have been working a lot the past few weeks so this thing has been on hold a bit. I'm nowhere near as much a gun nut (even tho I love fps's and making guns) as some other guys here. I'm aware of a few part names, like what a receiver is what the stock is but what is the slant break? Ya I could not even tell you what the manufacturer it is at all. I did my damndest to find as much ref as I could and to the best of my knowledge I was going for AK 103. I learned after that there were a bunch of diff manufacturers but to find ref for a single 1 ....argh I wouldnt know where to start. Unless anyone would like buy me an early Christmas present, I would very much appreciate
edit. Oh shoot I just realized what u meant by slant break, durrr, yeah I see now.
Great getting more practice, learned a lot more as always but ready to move on to something new pronto!
specs: 2048 maps and the poly count came out around to just over 9, 100. Wasnt trying to be too economical here but I didnt want to go over board either
Big thanks to EQ for some technical help and support with Marmoset, and everyone else who has shown any interest, given feedback and support. All you guys are the reason I keep doing this and strive to get better
I love how beefy it is man, and I think the textures came out nice, liking how the spec is reacting as well. Great work Eric, you're a big inspiration.
Replies
Also. It seems like you may need to tigthten a few bevels. The other thing I would suggest is thay you change the direction and the intensity of theligth. Rigth now is blowing your spec away and not really defining your topology.
hope to see more soon !
On a side note, your renders look grainy, it's especially noticable on the vault door. Try upping samples using Hammersly @ 1.0 quality, or use the mental ray ao shader which imo is a much quicker and better solution for high poly presentation.
Here's the setup I use for mray link no lights required!
JordanW: yeah thats def something thats been missing from my workflow...havent dabbled a lot in zbrush to add that final level detailing, but I could definitely see it improving the vault thats for sure.
Raul: sure
with the light, I have only 1 spot with an intensity of 1.06......I think whats making it seem intense is I adjusted the brightness/contrast levels of the renders in photoshop after the fact...too strong hun? and curious which bevels you think could use tightening. There are a couple here n there I purposely left looser in the case that when I bake it down it will read a little better...just looking at them now I would say the bevels for the holes in the heat sink are a bit looser than they actually are.
If thats what you mean, I kind of like the touch of the shoulder harness thing...Ive seen a few other spas's out there, all of them without it except for the one in left 4 dead 2. I think it gives it a little more personality even tho you probably wouldnt leave it in there like that if you were to use the gun.
and the grain... again, was added in photoshop...I think also whats not helping is the jpeg compression from imageshack where theyre hosted. =/ the uncompressed ones look better, but thanks for critique
I didn't know you added grain, not sure why either but apart from that the shadows on the vault aren't good quality. The model makes up for this but why lose clarity when you don't have to?
Anyways...I took the vault door into zbrush and gave it some detailing....not a lot of damage but just enough to add some interest. Thanks Jordan, I think its a nice touch and wise decision to do a lil zbrushing pass
anyways, ..I just took the spas into zbrush and I dont know how noticeable it is in these renders but there are a few knicks here n there...kind of hard to add in the right amount of imperfections without going overboard and giving the form the impression of stone or something other than a weapons material...but I think these turned out nicely, spent yesterday browsing/downloading textures and figuring out how to get some nice anti aliasing in zbrush
ps I think I'm gonna get started on this:
the an-94 or some other variant of the AK...theres I think a zillion of them out there
...sadly some of your pictures are not showing ...maybe you should follow EQs hint and try dropbox... its a really great hosting programm...
...looking forward for your next weapon...nice choice...
edit. alright there we go, I relinked all the main images from dropbox and resaved them at maximum quality, so now theres very little if any noticeable artifacts.
thanks also robster...yeah theyre pretty much standard setting, all I did was set the background res to double size then sized it down with AA half, changed the bg to solid black and turned on some perspective.
here I'll leave this here, will post more tomorrow.
Very nice, very clean models on both the AK and Spas, although I think that bar thing looks silly its just my opinion and I know they have them in real life so it makes sense.
Amarth theres some clips you cant see that grips onto the barrel and the smaller cylinder shape below it....
you can see it in this video here
[ame]
and then see how it clips on here
[ame]
Beartraps for the magazine I did not use any deformers. I modeled the main shape how it is actually curved and then the grooved raised parts separately and just eyeballed it
good you made the stock better. looks pretty sick.
Lauren hmm I guess I could do some renders later within max, but I want to minimize time on rendering thats why Im just plopping it into zbrush and using screen grabs essentially
ps. looking at your site, I love your Ital Design Cala. That used to be one of my fav cars after playing need for speed 2
And thanks man, they don't make games and cars like those anymore...
Much interested in knowing more about this.
thank Peter & Charles
edit:I used that at work to "render" (animation > make preview) a highpoly 360° animation of a car's components exploding and coming back together, worked fine for 2m tri's on a shitty laptop.
yeah I'm using it mainly for the realtime shader... for presentation purposes. n Thanks for the link, I had no idea there were such mat's for max. Sure if you could explain more that would be nice.
also, Ok I just dl'ed the mats from the Peppi's post in that link, how do I go abouts loading it up?
Also, could a shader like this be used in a videogame?
Personally I like to try and exclude any airsoft ref whenever possible, though I understand especially dealing with some more esoteric Russian hardware it's not exactly the easiest stuff to get good ref on. The trouble with modeling off airsoft is that your finished piece becomes a copy of a copy, but you knew that so I won't preach.
Sorry that you're in Canada because while Canucks can have guns too it's a whole lot more restricted that for us in the US. A decent Romanian AK will only run Americans about 400 dollars, and a spam can of 1080 rounds of 5.45x39mm is only another 140 dollars more or so. Lot easier to model something accurately when you hold one in your hands. Just sayin'
But then, as with cars, there are people who want extreme levels of performance. Either because it's their job and they want to squeeze every ounce out of the platform while reducing chance of failure or error, or maybe they're using it for competition. Or they just have a lot of money. So while you can get a very cool retro Vietnam-style AR-15 build for about 6-700 dollars (and I'm told build one for about this price as well), once you get into premium stuff--that both looks nicer cosmetically and (generally) works better too, you can go north of 2000 USD very quickly. Same for the 1911: the way the gun is you can have a perfectly capable one at 400 dollars, but the kind of 1911 you get for 2000 dollars is a unearthly dream by comparison.
The Bushmaster ACR just got released and the entry-level pricetag is $2,400. But hey, it's so next gen.
The only thing I could say is maybe take a look at the muzzle breaks. The style of gun your making looks to me exactly like an Arsenal SLR 107 series. I dont know if that is what you were looking to immitate or not but I would maybe change the muzzle break from a slant break to something that looks like this.
Also if you keep the slant break I would take a look at more AK's with slant breaks. They usually dont look up like that. They are tilted to the side. Other than that it looks pretty damn good. I would check the back of the stock too how it is smaller compared to the reciever. The stock is normally the same size as the reciever even if it is a folder. I can find more pictures if you want me to.:poly124:
Great getting more practice, learned a lot more as always but ready to move on to something new pronto!
specs: 2048 maps and the poly count came out around to just over 9, 100. Wasnt trying to be too economical here but I didnt want to go over board either
Big thanks to EQ for some technical help and support with Marmoset, and everyone else who has shown any interest, given feedback and support. All you guys are the reason I keep doing this and strive to get better