Introduction

Hi, my name is Ilya, and I'm a 3D weapon artist, trying to make textures and stuff like that. I've been studying 3D for about a year and four months, and today I'll tell you how I made this AK-47 magazine. Special thanks to the 3D GUN community, almost all the cool guys helped me create good textures and renders.

Software and References

The programs I used are Blender, Zbrush, Marmoset 5, Substance Painter, Photoshop, and PureReff. 

The basis of a good texture is references, and preferably in very high resolution, since when a person photographs any object, the photo will always have dead pixels, and the lower the image resolution, the more artifacts there will be in the photo.

The more references you have, the higher the chance of getting the material and type of damage on the object into the database. But the most important thing is to choose the main reference that you will rely on for roughness, metal, and albedo.

Modeling

The very first thing we start modeling a weapon with is the bullet it uses. In our case, it's the 7x62. Next, we use references to create the general silhouette of the object. Most beginning 3D weapons artists use CAD to create weapons, but I use Evgeniy Petrov's pipeline because it's easier for me and has very strong object control and near-perfect high- poly shading. When creating a basic silhouette, I look for information about the dimensions of the object and adjust the references in Blender to these dimensions.

This is what a scene with boolean objects looks like in Zbrush.

This is what the mesh looks like after Dynamesh and adding welding. I did the welding using the elastic brush.

UV

In UV, the most important thing is to make almost everything into islands with a 90-degree angle, that is, straight lines. I used one 4K texture set with a padding of 4 and a margin of 4. When you're creating work for a portfolio, you don't need to focus too much on padding and margin, since your texture won't be mip-mapped.

To increase the texel of your model, you can reduce the UV islands that are not visible from any side. I also baked the bullet first and then made a large quantity in the magazine for the sake of optimization of the uv, and as a result, by texturing one bullet, all the information was transferred to all bullets. I packed all the islands in Blender using PackMaster 3.0.

Baking

Baking a high-poly model onto a low-poly model was very simple on this model, so I don't see the point in explaining how I did it. I'll just say: enable dithering in the normal map settings and set the baking parameters to 64 samples.

Textures

And now comes perhaps the most difficult stage of creating a model – textures. First, I work on the normal map and make 5-10 light variations of color and roughness. We can work on metal, but this is a very fine line, since there is a high chance that it will all turn into one mush and the texture will be unreadable. At the moment, I work on metal only in damage/paint/dirt/dust/scratches/ and a few variations. At this stage we make a texture with a history as if the store had just left the factory 

Next, we add more explicit information, noise, gradients and highlights at the edges.

Then, we add more explicit information, noise, gradients and highlights at the edges.

After that, we create more severe damage, note that in reality there is no damage with a single fill color, so we must make the damage variable like noise, gradients, height, color, metal and roughness variations. Almost all damage needs to be done with stencils, since you can't create 100% realistic damage just by imagining it.

Here, I added milling, oil, and dirt.

And this is the texture we get. I textured all the objects using this principle.

Rendering

Rendering is also very important for the presentation of work, since weak work can be improved with the help of rendering, and a very good one can be killed by rendering. First, use a contrast HDRI map to show color/roughness, then add individual light sources and separate the object from the background; this will look more voluminous.

You can also add blue, red, yellow, or green light to create an atmospheric picture. If you are unsure about using different HDRIs, you can make 2-4 renders with each and then choose which one is better. 

Conclusion

Thank you so much to everyone who read this article. I never thought I'd get to 80 Level. I've improved my skills so much after this project, and I'm not planning on stopping.

Have a great day, artists, keep creating and growing in this craft. Good luck!

Ilya Blinder, 3D Artist