rotator pistols
technology used
Blender
Substance Painter
Adobe Photoshop
final renders
Above are Blender renders of the final product. This firearm was inspired by my novel: Cities Above the Clouds. They're similar to the weapons carried by the protagonist Mikayel Goenvelt.
For this project, I wanted to teach myself Blender while working on something I'm familiar with - firearms. I learned many of Blender's tools and features and it has become my daily driver since.
sketch and blockout
I have concepted this firearm several times for my novel, but felt in necessary to refine the sketch for this process. Then, I modeled the initial blockout in Blender based on the sketch, matching the proportions and prominent details.
geometry
With the blockout in place, I moved to refining the shapes and details while focusing on clean, simple geometry. I landed at just over 13k tris.
I went with a high poly bake on this project, and used that to massively improve the detail of the geometry adding rivets, plates, flutes, etc.
textures
For this project, I wanted to try using Color IDs to help me isolate different materials. The technique was really intuitive and helped make the texturing process faster and cleaner.
I also wanted to improve optimization by packing my AO, roughness, and metallic maps into a single texture by isolating each to a single RGB channel.