[WIP] M249 Maschine Gun

[OddEyes]

Hello,

thank you for viewing my work.

This maschine gun is for a 1st-person shooter project, and I wanted to upload the progress of my high poly model here for some feedback. This is actually my first weapon of its kind and also my first hp that detailed.

I just started to chop down the ammo pouch and scope to a low poly. I have the feeling, about 700 tris for the ammo pouch is too much .. :/

I'm looking for feedback on the accuracy of the gun, my modeling techniques and even the rendering and presentation. Please feel free to tell me what you think..

[ninersix]

I like how you have done the Ammo bag underneath the weapon.
Alot of weapon modelers that visit here are afraid to tackle organic shapes like that.
One thing that may cause problems for you when baking a normal map with this would be the 24 holes on the top/front grill. At the moment you can see in the high poly that they are causing issues/warping with the surface. An easy fix would probably be to create the piece without holes, then do a boolean on the high res. This should leave a clean surface, but really depends on how good your computer is because it may freeze up depending on the density of the geometry.

[BertR]

@ninersix,

Had that problem with the space between holes too, thank you

@OddEyes,

Very nice model, love the details.
Only crit I can think of (besides the problem with the holes), is that the screens are a little low-res / blurred. That should be fixed next time...

Edit:

Also, shouldn't it be machine gun instead of maschine gun ^^

[OddEyes]

@ninersix

thanks, that's a great tip. here a small comparison of the heatshield with those two different methods


@BertR

english isn't my native language, i guess i was thinking german at that moment ^^
And for the screws, .. hm there are so many of them .. i'll see what i can do

[BertR]

@OddEyes

My English isn't very good either but that maschine just catched my eye :P And I think you misread screens, no one was talking about screws here haha

[OddEyes]

@BertR

i guess i've read screws, cuz i'm not that happy with some screws at the scope ^^
the render time is awful long, so any higher resolution would take even longer

[Pumbaa]

Hello OddEyes, that machine gun is looking great!


I had a go at modeling that heatshield, tho in maya, it should be as simple as pie in max too.

1. First I created a pipe (tube in max I think), 12 divisions I found out was enough for this, 8 did not work.
2. I removed all the faces except the top ones, duplicated it and bridged the edges between the two pipes.
EDIT: Important to remember here is to keep the space between edge loops even in the direction and around the area of the bend to avoid shading errors
3. Duplicated that mesh and merged the vertices. Basically creating the shape from the top view.
4. Extruded the border edges straight down to give thickness, mirrored that mesh in Y axis to create a closed mesh.

Then I instanced it in -X axis and applied a bend modifier which I played around with.

It's probably just me but I avoid booleans like the plague. But once again, it's really only the end result that matters.

Good luck!

[RedAppleIvy]

Not much to say, really love the detail under the ammo (flap?), I would save the images at 100% and get a free dropbox account though as your getting nasty jpeg compressions I thought were errors in the model!
very surprised that boolean method didn't immediately mess up, think Pumbaa is right his method is a lot cleaner and if you need to tighten up any edges you don't need to worry about the flow should it come to it

[OddEyes]

@RedAppleIvy just registered at dropbox

@pumbaa
thanks for your very detailed instructions. Your modelling approach is also much better than mine.
Because i had very much trouble bending it in the exact same shape (i suck at bending, perhaps i should have call bender )
i used instead Path Deform (WSM). I created a path from the existing model and after a bit of adjusting the numbers, it fits now perfectly. i'm sure maya has such a modifier too. Now i have a smooth heatshield.. thanks everyone!

[juguefre]

Hello.

@OddEyes: is a great model to me, only 1 question where did you get the images of that machine gun? I need to make an M60 or a 50 cal machine gun (to mount on a truck) but can't find any decent bluepints or pics from all sides.

@ninersix are you saying that if I make a high poly model WITH holes and the low poly WITHOUT holes, after the bake I will end up WITH holes in the low poly?????(thru normal map), I'm REALLY sorry for my poor english, but I need to finish a ruger SR556 and the poly count is already at 10k tris (the low poly), the damn holes take 4k+ tris!!!!!!
Thanks to all of you in advance for your time and patience.