I am somewhere near saying im done with a little something i´ve been working on lately. Instead of posting different milestones or work in progress stages, i decided to finish something and replace them with a deeper "behind the scenes" which sounds way to professional so lets just call it "my thoughts on..." where i ramble a bit about the project I´m currently working on...

And like you probably have guessed already. Its the M1 Garand. A semi automatic rifle used in world war two and the Vietnam war by the U.S.

By pure accident i saw this clip and all of the sudden found myself in the desperate need to recreate this mesh and animation for UE4! No questions asked, since i generally do what my brains tells me :o

Disassembling the M1 Garand

So i gathered a bunch of reference pictures, exploded views and watched people assemble and disassemble the gun to its bare single screws. Impressive hardware.

I wanted to create a 3d lowpoly mesh for a game engine that wasn't presented through a boring turntable but rather a little animation that just does what you see in the gif above. Maybe even from the first person view of the soldier who looks at his gun while he is doing so. Something easy to animate that shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes to rig, skin and animate.

So i created the Highpoly in Maya and baked the normal. Here are some examples:

Highpoly (left)- lowpoly with baked normal

Wireframe

Highpoly (right)- lowpoly with baked normal

Wireframe

Highpoly (right)- lowpoly final textures

A few shots of the rifle in UE4:

Texture sample:

M1 Garand in Unreal 4

A little "behind the scenes" Ramble video on this project