USAS-12 shotgun

[Pete]

Hulloooo, haven't been around here in ages. *waves at everyone*

Here's something that I'd modelled, unwrapped, and started to texture in 2007, but left unfinished (like with almost all models I seem to start...) until a week or two ago where I felt like I needed to finish some stuff, since I haven't done much lately and need some content for an upcoming portfolio (my university course ends soon, so I should really be getting onto it), so i've been working on getting the textures done currently. Planning to do some normal/spec maps too and put it in whatever game I can get it in.

Since i'd originally intended to put it into The Specialists (a Half-Life mod), it's on 4 512x512s (with another map for the mag), but that easily combines onto a 1024. Tricount is 5436, plus 1320 for the large drum mag and 1927 for the lower capacity one, which seems a bit high but I didn't care too much at the time. The model was also made with lots of tris and ngons so i've tried to change those to quads where possible. I'm aware the text on the reciever/'main bit' is mirrored on the right, but with my original plan of putting it in The Specialists you'd never see it, and it's too late to effectively fix.

Anyway, the point of the post: critsplz! The texture's still a work in progress so any strangely plain areas are probably unfinished, but rip it apart anyway.

Quick render (diffuse, default max lighting, 0% self-illum):


Even-quicker-and-less-fancy-but-more-crit-friendly large 100% self-illum render:


Scruffy wireframes:


Diffuse in its current state, watermarked a bunch just to be safe *shrug*


I need to find a background colour that works. You can tell it's been a while, hah. Sorry!

To Do:
-finish texture (95% of the details done, just wear+tear and general tweaking to do mostly)
-quick highpoly for normal maps (though a lot of the normal detail will come from the diffuse)
-spec + normal map

Haven't posted any 3D stuff to a forum in years so apologies if i've missed something out or massively offended someone somehow. Anyway, thanks for looking!

[Torch]

Looks great, very nice material definition

[RedRogueXIII]

Pete! Glad to see you still around!

Your diffuse lit texture work is amazing as always, but while you've been away there has been an overall shift from lighting painted on the diffuse texture to dynamic lighting handled by the game engine. Of course it's not really relevant to goldsrc, but for any newer engines it's become the new standard.

It's quite a lot to explain but Millenia did a good tutorial that should bring you up to speed: [TUTORIAL] Weapon creation (M37 Ithaca) - Polycount Forum

CDG is barely alive, but old names will be both on CDG and Polycount. FPSB is still the same, although going under the name GameBanana now. Anyways I look forward to seeing you around again!

[Pete]

Edited the first post, I'd accidentally set the Imageshack uploads to downsize the images which made the large renders pointless. I'm so smart. Fixed it now.

Originally Posted by Torch

Looks great, very nice material definition

Thanks :] I'm not 100% sure about the material definition myself, the plastic parts all look a bit soft to me. I'll see if I can remedy that at all without making it look like metal.

Originally Posted by RedRogueXIII

Pete! Glad to see you still around!

Your diffuse lit texture work is amazing as always, but while you've been away there has been an overall shift from lighting painted on the diffuse texture to dynamic lighting handled by the game engine. Of course it's not really relevant to goldsrc, but for any newer engines it's become the new standard.

It's quite a lot to explain but Millenia did a good tutorial that should bring you up to speed: [TUTORIAL] Weapon creation (M37 Ithaca) - Polycount Forum

CDG is barely alive, but old names will be both on CDG and Polycount. FPSB is still the same, although going under the name GameBanana now. Anyways I look forward to seeing you around again!

Oh hey RR :] Good to (e-)see you too, heh. I'm aware of the importance/awesomeness of dynamic lighting, but still admittedly have limited experience in spec/normal maps/shader materials. I've been studying Games Design (slight misnomer, pretty much all 3D, which I like) at university the last 3 years which has introduced me to all of that (and showed me how many ways I was unknowlingly going wrong).

Now that you mention it though, I do feel a bit out of place showing something with heavy diffuse lighting, hah. Most of my lighting is on seperate layers though, so if I needed to tone it down for a more modern engine it shouldn't be too hard.

Thanks for the tutorial link, i'll check it out once my internet speeds up from an absolute crawl (problem in my local area). I saw racer445 did one too which i'm excited to check out because he's hugely rad. I've had a peek at CDG a few times over the last few years and noticed it's a bit dead, shame. Just posted a thread in WIP there with a ton of stuff i've been working on (i'd post them here but won't yet, just trying to concentrate on one thing at a time). I'm not sure if I can be bothered with GameBanana anymore though, long story short it seemed more hassle than it was worth to be there.

[/ramble]

Oh, and how did you get your user title to say you're a game art student?

[RedRogueXIII]

Gamebanana isn't worthwhile for any professional advice on how to improve art, so yeah it's not worth any time in that regard.

As for the title I can change mine from the user cp, group memberships, but I don't know if the game art student group is open to join or the like - it's been awhile since I have been an active poster here.

[gutty333]

Hey really nice diffuse only textures reminds me alot of these Weapons Skins

BTW really love how you texture your edge wear/scratch areas, did you approach that using a specific brush or do you use photo textures

[Pete]

gutty333 - Thanks, any comparison to Lonewolf is a huge compliment, in my eyes :]

The scratches and edging are done with a small hard brush with some random jitter settings. On some other bits the scratches are smudged (also with a hard brush) depending on what looks right. Apart from that, there's a few 'grunge' brushes used here and there.

[Pete]

Hey, bit of a bump. Working on some spec/normals for this currently, via CrazyBump/Photoshop. Hasn't worked as well as anticipated, but then again, I'm working with 512s (like I said, old model) and I still don't have that much experience with normals. Live n' learn :]

I probably should've turned the painted lighting down a bit, it's still a bit high. Need to get it in a game too, to test that. Still need to finish some parts (the bolt handle thingy is just base texture+AO+a couple of dents currently) and tweak it all, but it's mostly there.

Would appreciate some input on the normals, and just the whole thing in general really.

[tonyd927]

Excellent material work!
Howd you go about painting ? Im new to texturing

[Pete]

Similarly to this old tutorial I did: Tutorial: Texturing the SCAR-L rifle

Though it's really old, outdated (2006, back when painting the lighting on wasn't such a crime), and others have bettered it x100 since. I work a little differently now though, for example I paint everything on seperate layers now instead of dodging/burning the lighting and detail onto the base material, and draw a lot of the scratches/wear by hand.