I find myself fascinated by weapons (As dangerous a fascination it may be), so I feel I am in my element.
When coming up with a design, I decided to look at mainly assault rifles from various places; video games, real life and film. Because of the nature of the assault rifle, there isn't much that can be done to really go into how one works internally, and so it is all about how they look from the outside.
Some machine gun, machine pistol and marksman rifle designs were used, but this was for variety's sake; assault rifles generally follow three patterns; the AK, the FAMAS and the AR-15. Naturally, this is a general guideline made purely for where things go on the weapon.
When designing my own, I felt it important to look into how weapons work, and found this pretty handy giude to the inner workings of an assault weapon. The diagrams are flash files, so a URL is provided instead. The one linked is the one used in the final weapon design: http://science.howstuffworks.com/machine-gun7.htm
In regards to what I was to come up with, I decided to use a mix of the designs present here and some that were not, eventually filtering out designs that were not as good or that I didn't like:
Here, some elements from the FN F2000, P90, Thompson SMG, AS Val (Carbine variant of the VSS) and the Borderlands part design went into these. However, the designs were either too close to a real weapon or just didn't feel right. After some deliberation, I made this. It has been exploded to show individual shapes and material guidelines.
Modelling this was not difficult, merely involving taking the unexploded version then placing the image as a plane texture in 3DSMax and following it with the create tool. Individual components were created piece by piece, some duplicated to speed up production time. After an exhaustive process of adding supporting geometry and then adding what the Swift Loop tool would not make, the high poly model was complete, complete with select fire, assembly screws and picatinny rail!
Removing the TurboSmooth modifiers, screws and filling the barrel in brought it under 6,000 tris.
UV mapping was next, which was a tedious process to say the least. However, it was completed with a reasonable amount of space used, displayed here as an Ambient Occlusion render:
Then came projecting the high poly mesh onto the low poly to make a normal map. After several attempts and cage resets, the normal map was made. The indented text on the shroud and indents for the select fire decals were taken from the diffuse texture.
The diffuse texture was made with various custom techniques used to imitate metal and plastic.
Next came the specular. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any difference made by this map, but it was good to have for posterity's sake.
Once these were all applied, they were placed into Marmoset and configured to render. This was the result!
