Action Veteran

Hi everyone.

Some unrelated mumbling:
This post is kind of a return to the source for me. I joined BA-community somewhere around 2006 and used to visit this forum quite often. Somewhere between life and work my activity here faded to nonexistent, though I have been lurking the forum occasionally.
Anyway I’ve been longing for a community to participate for a while now and what could be a better place than the one that helped me so much when I was just beginning to learn Blender. So I’ll try to get back into more frequent activity around here. I’m not sure if I can still find here some of the awesome people who helped me back then, but I’ll try to return some of the favour by sharing the bits of knowledge that I’ve managed to collect during the years.

Now to this piece.



Link to original here

This is as-close-as-possible 3D-replica of one of my all-time favourite weapons from movies and games. A gun so used, I don’t think it needs any introduction.
Modelled by using blueprints and picture references, rendered with Cycles. Most of the inside parts are also there, but it’s still missing some. I’m planning on making it fully animatable with firing cycles and so on, but for now it’s just something to look at.

A closeup render from another angle


The textures and shaders are built in nodegroups so that I can easilly create different types of wear to the main material by adjusting the wear maks with curves or something similar. Below are some quick examples of the different variations that can be made just by adjusting the contrast of the wearyness-map. The slide, frame and rest of the parts use their own set of 4K diffuse, bump, dirt and wear -maps, also grips, barrel and magazine have their own textures.


I’ll be dropping some other personal works when I get to it, but this one seemed like a good one to start.

Thanks for reading, Anssi (Deadend).

Fantastic modelling and texturing, I especially like the wood. It would be cool to see some wireframes.

Wow! Amazing work! Materials are perfect. Ite olen hengaillut tällä foorumilla rekisteröitynä käyttäjänä viime syksystä lähtien. Mahtavaa on ollut huomata, että täällä on myös monia suomalaisia mukana. :yes:

Agreed, the materials look pretty much perfect. Awesome render! I’d also like to see some wireframes. :slight_smile:

What’s the texture resolutions for these?

Fantastic texturing! welcome back, I can’t wait to see more:)

Thanks guys!

I added some additional information and renders about the piece to the first post to answer some of the questions.

Here’s a dodgy wireshot to those interested.


That is a realistic result awesome, but if you could share the node of the materials you used as well as the texture files

1911’s rule!!! :yes:

Thanks!

I don’t think that sharing the materials nor the textures would be of any use, as those work properly only on that particular model and uv-map combination. And to be honest I don’t feel quite comfortable sharing straight assets that I’m planning to keep working on. I can try to explain the node setup a bit, once I get it cleaned up, now it’s just a big mess.

-Anssi

Yay! More finns! :smiley:
Exceptional work! The node-setup would be interesting to see. Especially your take on the dirt and wear -maps.

Hi,

really great work on model & textures. Congrats.

Wow, all of these are incredibly well done… they’re about as close to photorealistic as i think you can hope for.

Hey thanks! Long dark winters, nothing to do but practice blender, the conditions are perfect for us. :evilgrin:
A short insight on the material setup below.

Many thanks!

Thank you very much :slight_smile:

Here’s the cleaned up version of the material node setup used in all the main parts, including the frame and slide. I hope I didn’t break anything while doing the cleaning, at least it looked like it still functioned properly.


All in all it’s nothing fancy, a basic paint and metal materials that are mixed according to wear map. The wear map is basically very similar to a spec-map, a grayscale texture ligher on the parts where metal should be visible, it just controlls the blend between paint and metal. Then a dark diffuse material is added, controlled by the dirt map. Rest of the mess is just mixes between maps, so that the colors and the effects on the displacement, specularaty, etc is controlled by the same curve at the beginning of the nodesetup.

All the variations seen in the first post required some fine tuning, but a basic direction is easilly achieved just by adjusting the 2 main curves and the color input.

-Anssi

Wow…Very Awesome and nice render…I love it…Thank

Excellent work! So realistic…

Your renders are breathtaking, DeaDEnD! Were you this good when you took a hiatus, or have you been practicing the whole time you were away?!

Thank you for sharing your technique for material creation! The modeling and texturing/materials are beautiful. Also, what kind of lights are you using? I really like the quality of the light. Are you basically just placing the guns on a plane and lighting them, or is there additional scene geometry, to give it a “room” to be in? Your images look very polished.

Very good work, I love everything about it!

Thank you for your inspiring words :slight_smile:

I never actually quit doing 3D. Many phases between now and then limited the time and motivation I had towards it, but I never really stopped working with 3D-related things. It’s difficult to evaluate your own skills, but I can with confidense say that I wasn’t even nearly as skilled or knowledged then as I am now. The developement of Blender itself alone forces you to improve your knowledge with new features and techniques, that is, if you want to keep up with it.

As for my lighting preferences, every work is a different case of course, but I do resort to certain ways very often.
I tend to prefer some form of meshlights when working with physically based renderers like cycles. I usually use combination of big emitting planes with low force along with smaller more focused light-objects. The big emitter planes give very soft shadows and when positioned correctly can make beautifull reflections. Smaller more agressive emitters help to bring a bit “drama” in the scene, with more clear shadows and vivid contrast. I also use hdr env-maps to give the scene basic ambiance and soften the shadows in general.
The cycles real time viewport preview is just amazingly helpfull when creating the light-setup. When I start to light a scene, I have the camera view with cycles preview on one viewport, while I slowly adjust the places and forces of different lights in another viewport. It’s usually fast and easy way to get the result what I am after.

In this case, the light-setup is just traditional hdri + 4 different emitter planes. And yes, I like to spend countless hours just trying different things and polishing “ready” scenes in blender and in photoshop. It’s one of my favourite phases when creating a new work :yes:

-Anssi

Dude. This is epic! I love the texturing, keep up the good work!

Really fantastic work DeaDEnD. These are all gallery worthy images. Rate 5*s :slight_smile: