Arranging the Blueprints:

Firstly, I am very comfortable working with Autodesk Maya, because its tools are simple and fast. So I got two different views of the weapon. Top and a Side view. Mostly the Blueprints don't match from all views, specifically the details. What I always do, is pick the View with large forms or shapes. So, I took the Side Blueprint and imported it into Maya front view.

You can adjust the Placement of the Ref image to bring it above the Grid, through Attribute editor (CTRL+A) as show in figure. Then just add the weapon reference into a layer in Reference mode.

Modeling the Weapon:

The Assault rifle had lot of different, big and small shapes and designs, which where syncing with each other with quite flow. Which of course was looking very beautiful and lot Sci-fi.

It was critical, to achieve the same to do justice with the concept. So I decided to model the Rifle in three big sections.

1) The stock

2)The body

3)The front. I divided the weapon in three parts to make things easier for me.

Modeling the Stock :

Using Create Polygon tool, I started tracing the outline of the Rifle handle. Placing vertex at only required positions, so that the basic shape is achieved was what i was thinking. Once I got the outline plane I extruded it to work on its depth. Next thing is to work on the back curve area and make it as round smooth as possible. Then to do Symmetrical Modeling I duplicated the mesh using Edit- Duplicate Special, keeping Geometry Type -Instance & Scale value on Z- axis as -1.

Also, Splitting edges in between polygons to give sharp cut as shown in figure. Same way, make the big Mid portion of handle, which is something like a chamfer box. I preferred to model it separately to keep things clean. So the handle part was now done.

Modeling the Front :

The Front part of the weapon had plenty minute detailed designs.They were synced like tiles,but in a criss-cross manner.I kept modeling the same way,first making the basic planes then extruding & giving shape.Also giving them the elevation according to the design.The muzzle had strips around it.Complicated design, but its fun to work on them.

So, using a simple technique and then building up mesh detail over it is the key. Understand the shape, concept, imagine how it will look in a 3d space. Keeping things simple until detail is needed is helpful. Some points that i always keep in mind while modeling.

Since, this was suppose to be a highpoly version, I retained all the smoothness in shape. But, I didn't went too crazy about it, since it was still an Ingame-Cinematics version.

Modeling the Body :

The body had lot of big shapes including the Energy ammo Magazine, Sight and the Trigger Guard,Grip. So,first I started tracing the shapes and just creating planes of it and giving its depth at some portions like the bottom Hand guard area. Always make a habit to work overall.

So, next I shifted my attention building the Ammo Magazine. Same way, tracing outlines and knowing where to end the shape extreme, to create depth in-between is the key. Lot of details you need to think of before you actually start building up the mesh. I needed to think how the shape would merge inside, considering the complexity of nearby designs and how would they sync.

Once I was done with that I started extruding the planes of the shapes that I earlier created, and gave its depth. But, I had to make sure the planes are perfectly inwards or outwards, so looking over to concept individually is critical. It helps in differentiating the depth between two areas.

Unwrapping UVs:

The key for good texturing is smartly laid out UVs. It’s very necessary that bigger shapes get more area, thus more resolution. Using the space smartly and balanced overall the UV layout is critical. So, a Checker texture comes very handy for this. You’ll know exactly how well your texture wraps on the mesh, or if there's any stretching or overlapping in UVs. Just make sure the boxes are EVEN overall.

I used Planar projection for most of the mesh except, cylindrical shapes like barrel, laser, etc. Then Unfold or relax the UVs, using Smooth UV Tool in the UV texture editor. Also, I wanted to avoid much overlapping UVs, coz the Game Engine sometimes shows Backface issues in mesh.

So, considering all these points I did the UVs for the weapon, trying to give the best fit for each particular component. The final UVs were done, and the weapon was ready to be textured. I cleaned up the outliner and hyper shade with unnecessary nodes, to make the file lighter, before moving toward Texturing.

Texturing:

I was suppose to make Diffuse, Normal, Specular and Glow maps of Res 2048*2048 for the Rifle. So taking a snapshot of the UVs, I took it to Photoshop to start with the texturing.

Diffuse Map:

The key for texturing is to always start with flat colors and then gradually develop the shades and details. The weapon is having metallic, Carbon fiber, Plastic, etc. parts. So, I laid down flat colors over in Photoshop, in three different Base layers. Always work in groups to keep things easy and clean.

Then using the brush tool i started painting dark and mid color values over the Texture, for e.g. the grip. What this will do, is give a certain depth to the sections and also of course define the material. I used lot of gradients to create the values. At this stage avoid too much painting.

Overlay nice patterns, defining the material. I got a nice honeycomb texture which I used over the Grip. Now, you can start painting the Brushed-metal areas, Edge grunge, rust, etc. a little to give it slightly old look, as if it’s been used. Make it a little noisy, but don’t loose the original colors. It was supposed to look like painted metal. You can use filters, or color corrections which are very cool to achieve certain texture.

This way i finished up the Diffuse Map for the Rifle. You can preview the color map with the mesh best, when you turn on USE ALL LIGHTS after you add some ambient lights to the scene.

Normal Map:

My intentions with the Normal map, was to achieve the graininess of the metal, the brushed -grunge feel of it. It was pretty easy for me to derive such map using the Diffuse map itself through the NVIDIA filter Plug-in for Photoshop. It gives really good results.

So, once you install it, you’ll find it under Filter Nvidia Tools-Normal Map Filter. It opens up a window, where you can change your normal map settings. The Scale parameter determines intensity of the bump. And 3 was the value that worked out for me. Press ok and you'll get the map instantly.

To give it a little crisp, you can use smart sharpen filter. So, now i had a pretty decent Normal map with me, which enhanced the weapon details beautifully.

Specular Map

Th specular map is suppose to be spoton, to give that nice overall metal feel to the weapon. The grunge and brushed areas should shine where the painted metal color is roughed out.

I took the Diffuse map as the base. Firstly, desaturate the map(CTRL+SHIFT+U) and just work with grayscale. Then next thing, go to Image-Adjustments-Brightness/Contrast. Reduce the brightness and increase Contrast a little, to achieve values close to extreme.

Next step to use the levels. Shortcut CTRL+L.Adjust it in such way that the specular is not all over the weapon uniformly. The brushed part of curse would be more shiny then the painted metal area. Keep applying the spec map in-between to your mesh and see how it reacts with light, then adjust again according to requirement. So the specular map was done too.

Glow Map(Mask):

The Glow map was the easiest. The spots where the weapon was glowing(Neon Glow),was suppose to be white and rest area black. The Shader guys would plug-in the mask map and control the colors of glow through the Engine editor. So, just needed to add white patches to the blacked out map.

So with all the maps finished, the weapon was ready to get a beautiful in game render. I was really excited to see the results myself.

In game Rendering

Marmoset Tool bag is a full featured real-time material editor and renderer for Game art assets, in a real-time environment. You just need the .obj of the mesh and its maps. Rest of all magic can happen with Marmoset.

Just open your mesh inside Marmoset, and go over to 'Mat' tab and you can plug-in all your texture maps. Also, if you have back-face issue you can uncheck it and make sure to check use specularity.

There are some very nice in the Light tab. The Blue sky ambience preset worked pretty nicely with the Rifle. Also there are some post effects you'll find under Render. There are definitely lots of things you can play with Marmoset.

So, using all these settings and effects I derived a pretty decent render of how the weapon would look In game.

Final Words:

The process of creating a Sci-fi Assault Rifle was fun. Lots of different elements and designs was to be created and so some brainstorming was required before every step. I learnt lot working on it. I was pretty happy with the results what i got and the Art lead for our team was really amazed too & he was digging the design.

I hope you like it too and my approach of building the assets. And if you guys learn anything through it, this making of would be successful.

Thank you for reading it.

Cheers!!