Artifacts for No Apparent Reason

Hello fellow Blender artists,
I have been modeling a rifle for a game and I stumbled across a strange occurrence. I just went to render my scene to get a good look at the texture I just applied, but I found artifacts. I no that one reason artifacts might show up is if there are multiple meshes taking up the same space. This is not the case here. I checked and there is only one mesh. so I would like some help figuring out what my problem is.
I appreciate any help and thank you for your time.
P.S. I am not very good at texturing, so this problem could’ve stemmed from unwrapping or something I did with the actual texture.

Attachments


Sniper_Rifle_Please_Help.blend (864 KB)

If you want the quickest answer and to make it easier for those who want to help you, always attach your blend file to your post.
As you haven’t this is just a stab in the dark. Have you checked all your face normals are pointing outwards. Try Ctrl+N to recalculate. This does not always correct all normals so check their direction manually. Set them to display in the ‘Mesh Tools More’ panel when in edit mode.

Richard, I have now uploaded the blend file, but I had to delete all but the lights, the problem mesh, the camera, and an extra mesh to give a sort of comparison.
P.S. I am using the latest version of Blender. It’s version 2.5 Beta 3.

W -> Remove Doubles removes 393 vertices…and the artifacts.

I some doubles to create the sharp edges. I can’t just remove all of them. How do I get around this?

I looked at your model, it seems like your off to a false start. IMO your rifle is way to high-poly(I’m assuming that this is a FPS). it looks like your going to at about 2000 faces total for the rifle, and if this thing is in every frame of your game that means that something like 1/4 of the maximum faces possible will be occupied by the rifle.

I have uploaded a sort of retopologized version of your rifle stock. I think that you could do the whole model in less than 500 polys this way, freeing up a-lot of render memory for the rest of the game.

I would recomend that you check out Blendercookie.com and do all of the tutorials you can find. Another good resource for learning topology is guerrillacg.org.

Attachments

Sniper_Rifle_Please_Help.blend (897 KB)

Remember, to make a subsurfed edge sharp you go into edge mode, select all the edges in that part and crease them. crease = 1.0 is as sharp as they’lll go.

Geryoxide: I meant this to be hi-poly at this point, but I appreciate what you did. Just incase you thought otherwise, the modeling of the rifle is done. Thanks again!
Walshlg: Thank you! I never knew how to do that.
All: Thanks for all the support!
Off Topic: I just bought Luke Ahearn’s 3D Game Textures and I think it’s AWSOME! just to let the public know.