Matej's Gallery

[Timmaigh]

Brilliant, the texturing of the scope is jawdropping. But why Vintorez? Its such an awful looking rifle... PSG-1 or M14 EBR next please

Thanks (and to all others).

I find Vintorez a very interesting exotic design (I like the buttstock and big integral silencer). With the scope attached it looks less ugly than without. The next thing will probably be the AS Val, because I will be able to reuse most of the model. In the future I was already thinking of OC-14 or SVU (I obviously have a thing for ugly-looking Russian firearms ). The M14 EBR looks nice & 'techy', but I think it would be a big modelling challenge (but there are probably a lot more reference images and drawings around)...

BTW, I was hoping to finish it for this week, but I found some better reference images and had to remodel some parts which were not accurately done. Also the original model is one year old and I had less experience back then, so there was also a lot of mesh cleaning to do before I UV unwrap.

BTW2, I must give my thanks & credit to KardeN, who is sharing a ton of hi-res pictures of Russian small arms & gear on his photo-blog. I wonder where is he employed...? So if you need such reference pics, check it out.

LOL, obviously you do indeed. Anyway, looking forward to the render of the final model.

Thanks for the links, looks interesting.

[infernoVFX]

Matej the scope is insane - just awesome

[Hatak]

Respect from Russia.

Very cool!

[matej]

infernoVFX & Hatak; thanks & спасибо. I appreciate the comments.

Here it is, the first final renders of this project. Path tracing ~10min, HDRI illumination, rendered with transparency and then composited with a background. Damn it was a lot of work, but the end result is probably worth it. I will do some real shots (non composited) in the future with this models, so stay tuned

Clay renders to better appreciate the model since I put a lot of effort into it. I like it how the pure clay mode still keeps bump & norm info.

The modeling is still not 100% accurate (just 90%) and I could still do tweaks to textures & materials. But somewhere I read that the CG artists work is never done - and this is soooo true! If you don't want to get stuck in an infinite loop of corrections & improvements of your render, then you must set a finishing line and try to be satisfied with the results.

Anyway, I need a break. Have fun.

[Daniel]

Whoa!
That looks fantastic! I really need to start learning to texture like that! Modelling's always been my strong suit, but I've always found texturing to be a daunting and boring task.

[radiance]

Awesome work This was my favorite rifle in STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl Single head-shots

Radiance

[matej]

@Daniel, thanks. My preferred part of CG was always shading - creating materials & textures. Of course painting textures can sometimes be daunting, but so can be modeling

@Radiance, oh yes, Stalker: SOC - really great game. Vintorez with SP6 armor piercing bullets (on the first page ) and that Monolith guys at the end didn't stand a chance

[radiance]

@Daniel, thanks. My preferred part of CG was always shading - creating materials & textures. Of course painting textures can sometimes be daunting, but so can be modeling

@Radiance, oh yes, Stalker: SOC - really great game. Vintorez with SP6 armor piercing bullets (on the first page ) and that Monolith guys at the end didn't stand a chance

Yeah, the last part was awesome, where you choose to escape, and go over all the rooftops sniping monoliths

Radiance

[Scog]

Can you detail your texturing process to us? The results are very impressive.
Also how many polys is the model?

[matej]

The last scene is 962.475 tris in Octane. The texturing process is really nothing special; create the model, UV unwrap it, export the uv grid to GIMP, clean & prepare a base texture, paint your details (scratches, dust, etc..) according to the uv grid (I might do some texture painting in Blender, just to outline the regions where I'll draw the details later in GIMP), combine the custom paintings with the base texture into spec, bump or mix maps.

The process of creating materials in Octane is a little more involving. I go heavily with material macros & nodes, I try to reuse textures as much as possible, prefer to mix or multiply grayscale maps with color nodes over using RGB maps, etc... I also use the mix material a lot. The result of all this is that this scene fits into 520MB of RAM, so it's easily render-able on lower-end graphic cards.

The morale is: Learn to use Octane nodes because they are cool and at the same time you'll save yourself buying a 4GB Quadro