General tips for a beginner

Hey there everyone, this is my first post on the site of probably many. Like a lot of beginners, I suffer from the transfer of specifics learned from tutorials to my actual workflow. Sometimes I am looking for a specific (sometimes too specific in my own vain) answer to my particular problem. Sometimes I estimate or guess how things will work, take a crack at them and just test the waters.

Now, its probably a bad thing that I have almost no mental capacity on how to improve a model past a certain point. For instance, the following:

I recently spent the last week 1/2 developing this bolter model from Warhammer 40k, following multiple tutorials and combining the knowledge I received to make as good a mesh as I could. Everything’s alright in my eyes, I recently fixed a texturing issues I had with the model where the texures were stretched. I still feel like there is a lot that can be done to bring up the quality from “Thats alright.” to a sort of breath taking level with the end game goal being exportation to one of the various game engines.

Some basic questions I’d have to ask would probably be:

What do you think could be done to improve the overall look of the base mesh?

Was it good to have multiple pieces for the gun, for example the pistol grip is seperate from the body, as well as the hand guard and all the minute detailing already present?

Are there any ways I can make the details pop more, or to add more to the over all model to give it a more appropriate look?

Mesh:

Wireframe:


Materials:

Render:

It looks a bit too blocky, find references online and pick the parts you like.
For example, this picture gives you a good idea what it can look like in 3d.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/f/f8/Godwyn-De%27az_pattern_bolter.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120929023924

There seems to be many variants. Also, it’s better to model the parts separately but you need to give the impression of how they are going to fit together. A rifle barrel is not going to look good just glued to the front of a weapon for example.

First image shows darker faces, which is caused by inverted normals. Edit mode, select all, ctrl+N to try and make them consistent and pointing out. If that fails, either the object has negative scale or there are mesh errors.

Second image, don’t show wires see-through. Solid viewport shading and either edit mode and edge selection mode, or object properties -> display: wire, draw all edges, to show the wireframe in object mode.

Cropping images isn’t very smart when asking questions. The feedback from the interface is gone so there’s no statistics of the model or the viewport shading mode visible, information that could be provided without you saying anything.

Having a comfortable working scale, dimensions in the viewport, is fine. After the model is finished, it’s good to give the model real world equivalent dimensions. After scaling in object mode, ctrl+A -> scale to apply the object scale to the mesh.

Game assets often follow high poly -> low poly workflow. The high poly model is used to bake geometry and texture details on the low poly version.

Eyy thanks for the info so far, I didn’t know the inverted normals thing was such a big issue, perhaps thats why some of it was missing when I exported it to Unreal.

Also my bad, I’ve never had to ask anyone for advice before relating to blender, didn’t know the stuff on the side was so important.

Guess I should figure out how to bake high to low poly as well.

Guess I should figure out how to bake high to low poly as well.

Here is the BlenderGuru Anvil series and this video is the part where he takes a high poly sculpted mesh and applies it to a low poly mesh to get a low poly mesh with high detail. Might be what you are looking for. If you are lost at this portion of the tutorial you can follow through the whole series he has on the anvil but looks like you have a pretty good idea of what is going on.