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

[COMPLETE] Behind the scenes of the Next gen STALKER helmet

I wanted to take a break from the environment scene and started modeling a hardsurface mask. I´ll finish this one up and give it a full on PBR treat. Looking forward to this...

I finished the base highpoly of the mech helmet and added a few wires.

I also color coded them for an easy "base to texture" map used to define the PBR materials later on!

Click the images for a closer view

Next step is retopo

The lowpoly is done and is arround 6k polys. Baked the tangend and object based normals aswell as the base2Texture for PBR materials. Definitely learned a few things in terms of creating highpoly wires and how they should be modeld for an easy lowpoly bake. I started the base color and material definition and am looking forward to make a detailed texture.

Maybe i´ll finish up this one as a complete character one day.. but not to soon since there are other projects i wanna create. Mostly to see if i can archive certain industry standards to find a internship / junior position. Can´t wait to be part of an awesome company and help creating something people will love.

3DC Retopo

Shading and texturing an object for games is something truly amazing and satisfying. But if games are one thing, they are interactive. I never liked working on something 3D but just showing a 2D image. So a little "behind the scenes" of what my thoughts are and were i wanna go with this one. Im not native english so sorry for that...

Final turntable example and examples for my Portfolio page currently here: 

Property of...

Air lock and OPEN in russia

Water drops who got pushed back

Dont mix those cables up you might get an system error

Shading and texturing an object for games is something truly amazing and satisfying. But if games are one thing, they are interactive. I never liked working on something 3D but just showing a 2D image. So a little "behind the scenes" of what my thoughts are and were i wanna go with this one. Im not native english so sorry for that...

The lowpoly is done and is arround 6k polys. Baked the tangend and object based normals aswell as the base2Texture for PBR materials. Definitely learned a few things in terms of creating highpoly wires and how they should be modeld for an easy lowpoly bake. I started the base color and material definition and am looking forward to make a detailed texture.

Maybe i´ll finish up this one as a complete character one day.. but not to soon since there are other projects i wanna create. Mostly to see if i can archive certain industry standards to find a internship / junior position. Can´t wait to be part of an awesome company and help creating something people will love.

3DC Retopo

I finished the base highpoly of the mech helmet and added a few wires.

I also color coded them for an easy "base to texture" map used to define the PBR materials later on!

Click the images for a closer view

Next step is retopo

I wanted to take a break from the environment scene and started modeling a hardsurface mask. I´ll finish this one up and give it a full on PBR treat. Looking forward to this...

This was a one day job since i wanted this to be over as fast as possible. Build the base Highpoly and quickly made the lp with cage in Max. Then baked and textured it. UE4 PBR metal shading is awesome. I quickly thew it intro Maya and made it spin. Since i wanted to put at least a bit of love and interests in the "animation" i decided to give the main base a little shiver so you, again like the other fan with the moving cloth, can feel the motion. 

Also ingame every base (starting rotation) is different so they dont look to similar. Even if you can´t tell it, you´d feel it!

I think its the small things that matter and makes for a great scene... 

Click image for higher resolution

Click image for higher resolution

Ingame shot without animation

I wanted to give the new Quixel suite a try and build a cute little fan in 3ds max that i wanted to animate via maya. I attached a bit of cloth to it so you can "feel" the wind. Makes for an interesting environment asset. Thinking of making some ceiling fans aswell. Giving the scene a bit more life piece by piece.

Highpoly in 3DS Max

Rig and animation in Maya

Update on what I´m doing right now:

Created three basic highpoly tables (again references through AMCs Mad Men) and baked their normals to a lowpoly. Next step will be the adding of normal details through nDo2 and texturing the albedo/reflectivity/microsurface and bake the AO.

The destroyed_wall textures as well as the walls_bottom textures are done and added to the environment.

Also added more details in the gold frame normal

Ingame shot with wall textures 

Click image for higher resolution

Click image for higher resolution

Finished the chair PBR texturing and added a polycount blanket for the fun of it

Step 1: Create subdivided plane with planar UV mapping (for easy baking later) and create the highpoly blanket via nCloth physics, tweek attributes, maybe add some stickiness too and add a few animated passive colider to get the blanket where you want it (: Don´t forget to take copies of the blankets that you may use and create a little library to choose from. It can be tricky to achieve the perfect/desired look.

Maya nCloth to efficiently simulation a realistic blanket highpoly in seconds

Step2: Retopo the blanket. Make sure to triangulate certain spots so that the smoothing groups don´t look to sharp. Importing a mesh from Maya to Max may require some edit normal tweeks since some of my vert normals needed to be unified or they would shade ugly artifacts on the lowpoly and bake!

Step3: Create a CAGE that is kinda close to the highpoly so you even get into the foldings and crinkles of the blanket. It is NOT necessary to get every detail but rather the silhouette of the mesh and a clean look through the smoothing groups in the lowpoly. To avoid a big push for the CAGE try to change the verts of the lowpoly while looking if the CAGE modifier multiplier is enough to cover the mesh.

Rather than a bigger push, tweek the lowpoly again

Step4: Bake your highpoly normal, Bake to Textures (Albedo polycount logo and tileable normals) and your AO. (You may wanna create an nDo2 AO from the FINAL ingame normal and multiply your xNormal AO over it since this is the map that gets all the real infos from the highpoly depth!)

Baking not only the albedo but other maps is very helpfull 

And that's that! I think what makes this workflow so unique, cool and fast is the possibility to rebake something like the albedo or in my case the logo in seconds by just creating another texture without having to worry about fitting the texture to the UV layouts of the mesh. If i felt like making the smiley smaller or pull out another of his teeth, because I´m cruel like that, wouldn't be a problem whatsoever. 

And just talking about that makes me wanna change the logo again since its so easy and gives one the capability to just concentrate on the art rather the irritation of UVs.  But it´s like 3am. Geez (: