Skorpion VZ 61

The recreation of the iconic Skorpion VZ. 61 was apart of a recent personal project to work on my low poly definition when baking curved surfaces onto them. I chose the Skorpion mostly due to the unique cylindrical front end where the barrel is installed.

Starting off my process of recreating weapons, or rather anything, is to gather a boat load of reference.

My reference boards Tend to be a collection of necessary pieces, in this case, references for the major areas of the gun such as the receiver, grip, stock, mag, trigger & trigger guard etc alongside possible accessories such as the holster of the gun, which I never ended up making as I felt like it was straying to far from my initial goal of working on my curvature baking.

After reference gathering I begin the modelling process, working on my high poly first in a non-destructive sub-d workflow, as to reuse the High poly mesh for my Low poly.

Above is the final High poly asset, making use of a few boolean's here and there for micro details to bake later on down the line. After finalising my High poly, I duplicate the asset and strip it of almost all modifiers except for the bevel and normal face weight modifiers, as I leave a chamfer (on edges I've weighted by hand to have bevelled) and then use a face weight modifier to have my low poly as close to my high poly shading wise as possible, as this extra weight will help provide a cleaner bake later on

Above is my final Low poly Asset. It could be further optimised but as of the moment, it is sat at 78k Tris in total. To keep up the level of detail I want to show in the final asset, I split it up into 2 materials, both to be set at 4K.

Above is my Low poly Assets Wireframe.

Here is the splitting of objects into separate materials and their subsequent unwrapped UV's.

Before going into the texture/baking side of things, I make up a stencil of any markings or stamps I can find of the firearm.

Here we have the baked and exploded asset, ready for texturing. For texturing I make use of the same references as I used for modelling pretty much, knowing the underlying metal would most likely be something along the lines of a Steel or Aluminium and the Coating on top is a polycoat, although given the origins of the firearm and my references, I render it as more of a thickly applied paint, So I can play about with much more egregious chipping and damage.

Here we have the layers for my base material. I keep it pretty simple since we wont be seeing a terrible lot of it. most of the variation is present is in the base colour, as the metalness value is kept high as is the roughness, to show age.

In this process view we can see the building up of Height definition, starting with a simple stencil, applying a faint bevel, then blur slope with a high pass and finally blurring it 

Next is the creation of the coat layer, A much glossier layer overall, but one that will be largely defined by the mask next

The mask is hand painted with the use of another chipped paint stencil to control some edges. I mainly keep it to the Ink Dirty brush within painter to subtract from whatever I've added to thin out some scratches while keeping the chips noticeable, the flakes are taking off more than it should along with it. 

On the right we see the result, that is then layered with an edge height based on my hand painted mask with some noise, to increase the edge wear of the paint, then further layered roughness and occluded dust.

I then export two variations of the textures, normally I only keep to 4K sets, but for this specific Project, I wanted to use 8K textures in my final ray traced renders.

So after having exported my textures, I go and apply them in Blender.

here is the final textures in blenders real time renderer, Eevee.

I decided next to create a more realistic setting and to achieve this I make use Quixels megascans of both chipped wood and a photogrammetry scan of a military tarp as the main focus was to be put on my firearm model.

here is the final high quality render of the asset, with this render texture set being in 8K with Quixel assets. The Quixel assets being the Chipboard texture and the tarp Mesh + Texture.

Further high quality renders taken inside Blender.

Here is a real time viewer of the asset with 4K materials applied to it.

Overall, this project has given me a better understanding on low poly curvature baking and mesh resolution, and was also a fun way for me to push my texturing skills further.