Ok, so I see some beautiful gun models, and then I look inside the barrel and see that the muzzle has no grooves. It happens, right? So I decided to try and model the grooves myself. It turned out to be just a little bit more involved than I thought it’d be, but the result is not bad.
This tutorial is divided into two posts (because of the 6-attachments-per-post limit). The second post contains the final render of the grooves (so you can see what you will be modeling), and also the .blend file.
One note before we begin. The grooves in this tutorial (a) have nothing to do with how the grooves actually look on a real gun, and (b) are probably too pronounced for most gun models you’re making. It’s not difficult to modify this technique to create the kind of grooves you want for you gun, though.
1. Creating and extruding the dents
First let’s create the dents that we’ll use for the grooves. Start with a circle. We use a 32-vertices circle, which means we will have 16 grooves. The number of vertices is, therefore, twice the number of grooves, and has to be even or this technique won’t work.
Next we extrude the circle by pressing Ekey then pressing 0 (zero) and ENTER. Then scale the circle down. Do this two more times to get something like the image below:
Now, remove every second section of this ring. The best way to do this is select a face select mode, and using the brush select (hit Bkey two times), and finally deleting the faces by pressing the Xkey and selecting Faces from the menu.
We now have the profile of the dents. Extrude them along the Y axis and select the side faces.
2. Rotating the dents to create the spiral
Now from the Mesh tool palette in Editing tab (F9) click on Subdivide a few times. Use the box select to select vertices at the end of each newly created segment (see image below).
Rotate each segment boundary by 15 degrees. Also rotate the last segment.
3. Creating the outer surface of the muzzle
Now add a new circle (still in edit mode) and scale it up so its radius is bigger than the radius of the dents.
Extrude it by 0 (zero) and scale down the extruded circle so it partially overlaps the outside of the dents.
(continued in next post)
