Sig Sauer M400 Custom
It's a contraband AR-15 from the year 2042 assembled with the components that were sold in US gun stores before it were illegal.
INTRODUCTION
I have carried out this project during a six-month master's degree, where I have learned different advanced workflows and modeling techniques that I will explain in more detail below.
I am not a weapons specialist, but after seeing many references and videos I have become an "expert" (in terms of technical knowledge of weapons). It's a SigSauer M400 with custom parts and different accessories, I wanted to give it a futuristic style and the suppressor and handguard are my own design.
These are the components:
Lower: Sig Sauer M400 / Upper: Sig Sauer M400 / Grip: Sig Sauer M400 / Buttstocks: SB Tactical SBA3X / Handguard: Custom desing / Foregrip: Strike Industries LINK Curved Foregrip / Suppressor: Custom desing / Optics: Sig Sauer Romeo 8H / Laser device sight: Dbal-A3 / Battle light: Mk4 Battle Light
BREAKDOWN
REFERENCES
To model a weapon, it is necessary the study of mechanical parts, for this I watched many YouTube videos of assembly and operation, in the process I was adding screenshots of interest to my pureref. For the optic, laser sight and battle light I have independent purerefs that I don't show in this breakdown.
MODELING
In the master we have seen mainly two modeling workflows, Fusion 360 (trained by Jabier Benitez) or 3Ds Max (trained by Adrian Moreno) for modeling and Zbrush to smooth edges and final details of high poly. Throughout the master I have been doing my own research on how to transfer those workflows to Blender.
In the first part of the master we had to model a main weapon attachment with Fusion to learn that workflow. I modeled the Sig Sauer Romeo 8H optical sight. The main problem with this workflow is the low poly stage due to bad geometry when exporting from Fusion. To make this task easier, I included the Pixyz Studio software in the workflow for a more correct and easy to work topology for low poly, better than with MOI 3D.
For the rest of the weapon and after deciding which workflow to use, I took the risk for blender (my main tool) and an "adaptation" of industry workflows to blender with the help of a Chamferzone tutorial that explained the main new workflows with blender.
Mainly I have used 3 workflows/techniques:
Classic modeling with subdivisions: For organic surfaces like the grip. It requires a good topology.
Bevel weight + subdivision modifiers: In not very complex hardsurface objects it is a RAM/CPU/GPU friendly solution, it allows you a less clean topology in the flat parts and you can change the smoothing of the edges individually in a non-destructive way, on the other hand you can have problems in certain parts with the overlapping of the edges of bevel (Clamp Overlap) and it is necessary to insert some loops manually or play with the weight or amount of bevel.
Crease edges + SubD + Remesh + Corrective Smooth + Decimate modifiers: In objects with surfaces or complex booleans I have used this technique to smooth edges, it would be the equivalent of exporting to zBrush and doing a Dynamesh + Polish, it allows you bad geometry and triangulation but you can use it for low poly and in blender it is non-destructive with modifiers. On the other hand, the performance is not as optimal as in the previous cases.
Boolean modifier: For objects with complicated surfaces and requiring precision.
In all cases, if it is necessary to add details in displacement or sculpting the high poly, it would be necessary to do a remesh (in blender) or export to zBrush.
LOW POLY
For the low poly I did an unnecessary geometry cleaning keeping the main shapes and triangulating. I also add the triangulate modifier in case I miss any N-gon in addition to avoiding export problems to other programs or rendering engines.
UV & BAKE
For the UVs I use the ZenUV and Packmaster addons for blender instead of Rizom UV or Maya.
I divided the weapon into 5 sets of textures, taking into account the volume of the pieces to have a balanced texel density between the different sets of textures and take benefit of the space.
I do the bakes in Marmoset Toolbag, it's faster than substance painter and gives better results despite the latest Substance improvements for baking. Here some examples.
TEXTURING & RENDER
I had to do the texturing quickly and with little experience, it needs a history telling pass, a better comprehension of the metal materials and finish the attachments. The textures are made with Metal/Roughness shader. I have tried to be faithful to the references and understand how it behaves in different lighting setups.
For the renders I have used Marmoset toolbag with different lighting situations to show the work in textures with roughness variation.
And that's it!
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