Laser Rifle is Complete!

I always find this part of my portfolio work very exciting. I'm proud of myself for getting my last project done, and I'm also excited to get moving on the next one. I must say that with some victory Chipolte in my stomach, I am also excited to take the rest of the day off and catch up on some Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Modern Warfare 2 (Apparently I like sequels?). As I said, the normal map is what caused the most problems as far as time goes. The diffuse map took me about half a week to do, and the specular and transparency maps literally took only about two hours. It's always discouraging when only the diffuse or only the normal map is applied to the object, because without all the textures applied, it looks crappy. When they are all working together harmoniously, it really makes me think that maybe I do have a clue with what I'm doing. :) I was a bit late on this one, but not by much considering what I learned from it. I originally wanted to have it all done by Thanksgiving, but instead got it done today, which is about a week and a half late. With all that I've taken from this project, that amount of time seems very, very trivial.

BOOM. There she is. One thing I must first of all say is that I learned one huge lesson with specular and normal maps in Unreal. Lighting is king. If your lighting sucks, then you won't see bump details or any kind of glossiness on your stuff. I feel dumb for not seeing it before in the Chernobyl project, but the lighting definitely needs to be reworked in order for more details to show. Since I didn't have any reflection map to work with on this one, i made up a fake reflection in the diffuse map. Combined with specularity, I think it works well.

Here's another closeup of the ammunition holder. I had problems with getting the batteries to look like they're behind some glass, so i faked it by lightening them in the diffuse map, and adding specularity to the transparent glass covering it. The "fan hole" or whatever you call it was added last, without any problems. It bumps nicely and has some good depth to it. I actually used my external hard drive as a reference for painting in the scuffs marks on the silver metal surface, which was a happy coincidence that it happened to be laying on my desk while I was pondering how to treat it. I really had to battle the specularity on the black wiring. It was coming across as having a way too strong shine to it, so I had to tone it down alot. Unreal definitely takes the grayscale value of the specular map differently then Maya. It seems to be much pickier.

I'm really happy with with this one. It's definitely one if the more realistic looking things I've made. Just like the wiring and many other things on the model, specularity was a battle. The dents from the normal map seemed to get swallowed up by the color detail and I was starting to get worried that it wouldn't show. Once the specular map came into play, it was no longer an issue. Just another example of how everything works together.

And the scope. I really struggled in my head with getting the wear and tear to really show on it without totally knocking you over the head with it. I cut back on some of the edge chipping compared to before and made the scratching minimal. Just so that you could JUST see it. I had to make the specularity almost not show up at all in order to make it look like metal. It seems that unreal REALLY likes to make cylindrical objects shine, so that was probably the hardest part with the spec map.

And last but not least, the improvised part. As you can tell from the conceptual picture, the knobs on the trigger were on the opposite side. After talking it over with Jake, it seemed that it would work better on the other side, so that the detail was more spread throughout the model. It worked in the conceptual sketch, but on a rotating model, well, that's different. The extrusions on the ammunition box were improvised due to there only being one side showing in the sketch. So, once again I took inspiration from my external hard drive and filled in the gaps with what you now see here.

A few specs on the model:

triangles- 2,100 ish.
triangles on the high poly model used for the normal map- roughly 16 million, or 8 million polys.
layers for the diffuse map in photoshop- 49
size of all textures used- 2048 x 2048
time spent on pre vis- a week or so
time spent on low poly modeling- a week and a half.
time spent on UVs and texturing- a week
time spent on learning and making the normal map- a little less than a month.
time spent overall- roughly a month and a half

I am doing the same thing that I did with Chernobyl. I'm holding off on any kind of camera movement and final touches for the demo reel, just in case I change things last minute, which I'm sure I'll do.

So thanks are in order:

Jake Rynkiewicz, for of course providing the foundation in which to build upon. Without his concept work, this wouldn't even exist. God knows I can't do that stuff. ;p

Jesse Sandifer, an extremely talented 3D artist. He's the guy I mentioned that tutored me with zbrush. Without him, you can just forget about me figuring out zbrush on my own.

And finally, Joe D'amico for his support on well, everything I do. HIGH FIIIIIIIVE JOE!


And so, in a couple of days I will be posting the beginnings of the desert environment. I need to see where Joe and Jake are at with this, as I know they both work ridiculously hard with their jobs. Expect to see something soon.

Ryan out.