I decided to up my skill (I’m here for a more that 5 years and can’t do anything harder than a bunch of boring boxy stuff… no wonder why I can’t find a job), only to end up in stupid-town, because my brain unable to comprehend the sheer concept of how to model such stuff. I always struggled with semi-organic stuff (cars for example), so decided to start here.
I’m trying to make a 3D model of a shotgun (Mossberg 590A1 more specifically) for a game. Tried to follow tutorials, but people doing models so effortlessly, while I struggle duing even the simplies things.
At first what I reied to do is doing it out of box shapes with bunch of modifiers (edge modifiers, data transfer, shrinkwrap). Result is not great.
This is awesome. I would just like to say - don’t be discouraged by this seemingly endless struggle, I recognize this as the learning process I went through myself. Doing and redoing and redoing and then redoing some more. That’s frustrating, but the good news is that learning is happening at it’s best here. It gets better. At least that’s what I think.
I think the attempts are great. The problem is that you get to that “effortless” state by practicing and so it takes quite a bit of time.
I’ll try to have a closer look at the forms you are modelling and I can describe in a bit more detail how I would approach it personally hopefully with my thinking process described a bit as well.
OK, so there are different variations of it, there is a version with forms more smooth and there is one with a sharp ridge, the idea seems to be that there is sort of a pinch here:
And from what I have seen, this part here gets quite thin, thinner than what you have:
So once I get some sort of an idea about the form, I thin I need to model the stock and then the handle first because they are easier and then there will be some fun involved connecting the 2. I’m pretty sure that’s very similar if not exactly the same as you have done. And this is actually the screenshot where you are doing just that:
The only thing is that you didn’t get the form right during that try. I think that’s the right thing to do and I also think that it’s quite normal and OK if it takes a few attempts. I would go that route. It would take me a few attempts as well. And looking at this now I don’t think me modelling the actual thing is going to be helpful, because you already seem to be exploring the exact same thing I would do, but it maybe needs a few more attempts.
Not very helpful I guess, I was hoping I could advice more but as went through with this I just realized, you are already doing everything right and probably are a few attempts away from getting everything right.
If I had to make such a complex shape, I would first try to get the shape correct by whatever means necessary (without caring for topology), then I would retopologize at the end to get a good polygon structure (if necessary for the model’s use).
I think your attempt here is actually on the right path:
Starting from there, I would voxel remesh the different objects together so they are one surface with dense geometry (the inner surfaces might need to be enclosed before it works). I would then do some sculpting to refine the shapes, then carve the holes using booleans.
Once that is done, you get a model with the correct shape, but a polygon structure that’s a disaster. If that’s a problem for the situation, we can do manual retopology. Much easier to deal with the shape and the polygons as separate steps than try to model correct polygons in the correct shape all at once.
Here is an example of retopology if you don’t know what I’m talking about. This video does it for the purpose of baking a normal map, but the same setup applies if you just want to redo the structure of an object.
Ohh i meant this more for “the other users” because it’s quit interesting…
Usually using lots of reference and also maybe physical ones may help to visualize this… Sometimes also the real physical workflow of manufactoring something can help.
Not very helpful I guess, I was hoping I could advice more but as went through with this I just realized, you are already doing everything right and probably are a few attempts away from getting everything right.
