Hello, it’s been some time since I posted here.
It’s past 1am as I’m writing this so this might be a mess.
Back in September I made a challenge for myself where I would try to make one 3D render per day til the end of the month, I made a separate topic just for this challenge:
It was nice and fun at first but I quickly started to lose focus and get tired. In the end I completed just 11 renders out of the 30.
I was thinking about continuing the challenge anyway and complete the remaining days, but October went by and I didn’t have the energy to work on anything. It was weighing down on my mind that I had to complete this before I could work on any other project, so I made the hard decision to abandon the challenge and move on to something else.
I have also decided to not participate in these kinds of daily challenges anymore as I always give up less than halfway through. I prefer to take my time with art otherwise it becomes too frustrating.
Now for what I’ve been working on recently, I’m making a fan art of the Loose Cannon from Team Fortress 2. I haven’t played the game in a while but there was a time I was having so much fun playing demoman with this weapon. With practice you can time your shots just right so you can do a combo on the enemy player, it’s one of the most satisfying mechanics in the game.
Here’s the highpoly. I extracted the original model from the game to use for scale reference, then I adjusted the proportions a bit for a stylized look. I did sculpt some parts but kept it very simple.
And here’s the lowpoly mesh. For most pieces I made the lowpoly by duplicating the highpoly and applying 1 level of subdivision with creasing to smooth only the curves, then I remove unnecessary edges and push and pull vertices around until it looks good.
For the UV map I unwrap every part and adjust the UVs first, like straightening long strips and fixing distortions. Next I select all the UVs and equalize their scale, then I scale up only the islands that I want more texel density.
To pack the UVs I use the addon UV Packmaster. For this model I set the addon to group the wooden parts and the scope bits to be packed together. Then you just press the button and it’s done! this addon has saved me so much time making UVs.
And that’s it for now, next I’ll try to figure out how to texture it.
I’m happy to post again in this sketchbook 