Philipp Schmidt described the way he approached the creation of his interesting weapon model. The ‘Mac 10’ was textured with Quixel SUITE and rendered with Marmoset Toolbag 3.
Hey guys and Girls. My name is Philipp Schmidt and I’m a 3D Freelance Artist from Germany. I started modeling 3D stuff about 4 years ago for our Crysis mod called “Project Nublar” which I made with a friend. After that I started studying 3D Art at the SAE Institute in the neighboring city called Bochum.
2 years later I finished my studies with a diploma and took some time off to work on personal stuff and my portfolio. A few month later I was contacted by Crytek via Twitter to ask if I was looking for a job. So I moved to Frankfurt and worked from January to July on “The Climb” and “Robinson: The Journey”. In July I left Crytek to work with a friend on our upcoming VR Game.
Since the day Quixel launched the Quixel Suite with nDo and dDo I love to play around with it. In the beginning it was quite laggy and crashed very often, but the current version is very fast and stable.
I totally love the easy workflow from a blank project over to nDo for some details and after that to dDo to texture your asset. In addition to that they have a very powerful renderer with 3DO.
My favorite toy in dDo is the Dynamask Editor, which allows everybody to create awesome wear & tear on your models. Of course, you can create other nice details for your objects or characters.
The Smart Materials are very useful too. They are extremely flexible and you always get a real look because they are based on scanned data.
This was my first weapon. I went for an easy one, the good old Mac 10. I was quite surprised by how many different versions they have. So I went for a mix between Mac 10 and Mac 11.
Before I started modeling I looked up some Mac 10/11 Reference pictures, so that I had some rough measurements and the right scale. That’s not really important for this project, but if I would sell it on a marketplace that would be important.
So after I collected my Pictures I started with the high poly.
I started modeling with a side view picture of a Mac 10. I created a base mesh with the standard Maya tools. For boolean operations I used “K-Tools” made by Klaudio Ladavac.
For the edges I used the support loops and bevel method.
So nothing special here folks, just modeling. After a while the high poly was done and I made a copy of it, deleted the support loops and merged stuff down. In the end I was at around 12K Tris, which is totally ok for the current game weapon.
After I’ve created the low poly it was time for UV’s and the colorID map, which I made with different materials for different materials. This will be very useful for dDo, to apply specific materials to specific parts of mesh.
Then it was baking time. I baked my meshes in Substance Painter because I think it has a very powerful baker. I baked a normal map and a color ID.
The bake was very clean so I went straight into nDo to make some details, like the text and the face. After that I converted the normal map into an ambient occlusion map for dDo.
The last part was the texture, which I created 100% in dDo.
I started with some basic materials and smart materials to block out the colors and materials I like.
When everything was in place I added some material and color variations and applied some masks to simulate damage and dirt.
I decided to render the weapon in Marmoset Toolbag 3. It is the upcoming new version with new cool stuff. Unfortunately I can’t talk much about it yet.
So that’s it. I hope you guys liked this little post and, if you have some questions, I would be happy to answer those.
Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev.
