A
lecturer of mine who is an incredibly talented concept artist
(http://davidpaget.co.uk/) had an idea for an Assassin's Creed game
set in Victorian London, an idea which I think we can all agree would
be pretty badass! Once of the concepts he came up with was a
revolver...
Considering
I'm taking a break from doing full environments a nice weapon would
be a nice challenge, plus I've never modelled a revolver before... I
don't know why considering they're pretty sweet to look at.
First
thing I did was break down the concept art to try and figure out how
best to build it...
I
decided to build it in a variety of parts. I set myself a triangle
count of 4k. I was rather surprised at how complex revolvers were I
ended up trawling google images for blueprints and schematics on how
they were put together which ended up being a huge help. I found from
my initial concept breakdown was to simplified, revolvers are made up
from a lot more parts!
Once
I had the modelled built I set up the smoothing groups and unwrapped
it. I then exploded out the model and detached the parts that had
high volume of detail on them into individual parts and prepared them
for sculpting in zBrush.
Modelling
the detail in zbrush was a fun challenge I ended up looking at a load
of filigree reference to try and get the correct look. I ended up
drawing the pattern on with a mask then simply flipping the mask and
using the inflate deformation tool to get the detail. It took a few
tries but finally I came out with a result I was happy with.
Next
came the baking of the normal map. The normal map turned out loads
better than my Blood Bowl helmet. I think I'll be exploding all my
models for baking from now on.
Once
I had my normal map created a colour map and baked out an AO map. I
then plugged them into the Quixel Suite and off I went texturing. I
adore this tool!
It
took a lot of trail and error to finally get a texture I was fairly
happy with. The beauty of the Quixel Suite is that I could make
changes suer quickly even totally scrapping the texture and starting
again was an incredibly fast process. This was my first iteration
which I felt look a little too... Evil?
Once
I had a good enough base I then made some tweaks of my own. Even with
the Quixel Suite it seems you can't beat the control of a good ol'
wacom tablet. I overlayed some pattern on the barrel of the gun which
turned out to be my favourite part of the model, I'm a huge fan of
subtle details.
In
the end I'm a lot happier with this model than the last. But looking
at the concept art now and my final model It seems I may have lost
sight of the original concept a little. I could have stayed more true
to the colour pallet of the concept, I got a little carried away with
the Quixel Suite it seems. Restraint, Christopher... Learn some!
Peace
and love x
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