First Handgun

I would like to hear as many critiques as possible. Any tips regarding materials/texturing/PBR nodes would be helpful, as well as the odd creases that are not present, and the bland nature of the main body.


Hi,
Nice gun you’ve made:).
Here are some tips;

First of all the edges of the gun are very sharp. In the real world edges never are totally sharp but are always a tiny bit rounded off.
To smooth out your edges slightly you can use a bevel modifier. (I usually use an angle limitation to make sure only sharp edges are beveled).
Finally there are some pointy surfaces which should be smooth, like on the left side of where the handle and the gun meet. Try smoothing these out.

There are some thing to improve on you texturing as well;
Have a good look at some refference images of handguns and you will see that the plastic doesn’t simply have a flat black surface but that there are subtle bumps and tiny scratches. To make your material more realistic try mimicking this with bump.
Also the metal material doesn’t quite shine enough. You probably mixed a diffuse shader with a glossy shader, although actual metal exists nearly only out of glossiness. Only for rust or paint etc. you should use a different shader. Again here some (very) tiny bumplike scratches would make the metal more realisic.

Making the material more divers will probably take away the bland nature of the body.

Let me know if you have any progression:)

Bad lighting, use HDRIs and watch Gleb’s Tutorials!
I bet there are images of disassembled guns on the internet! Use these!
The materials don’t look that great, but I know how hard it is to create good looking materials.
For now I would download the latest release candidate and use the new Principled UBERshader, might make everything more easy.

Thank you both for your advice! I agree that there were many issues, mainly with the materials of the object. Therefore, as this mesh had incredibly bad topology, I decided to improve on a brand new project, which is my shotgun (also found in this section of the forums).