Hard Surface Weapon

This was our first formative for hard surface weapons. It is a W.I.P due to the fact that we will be using them in our end of year portfolio. So all the formatives I have previously been posting will change over the duration of the year and I will be updating them.

So I decided to make a Winchester Shotgun which was used in World War 2. 

Here is my reference images. 

For this I had to make separate pieces for my model, previously I had tried to bake my normals from my high poly to my low just as one piece but that didn't turn out as well as I had thought out. So I pretty much had to separate the pieces such as the barrel of the shotgun, stock etc.

After that I exported each piece ( high and low poly) and used X normals to generate the normal maps. Using Photoshop adjusted the normal maps of each to align with the UV's.

  

I will be going back over this to fix any texture issues or even go over it again entirely depending on what new techniques we learn during the year. But as of now I'm quite pleased with the result......so far.

I am also thinking of using this weapon for our first person shooter animation which will consist of a reload animation, an idle etc.

GA2A03_RTA ( REAL TIME ANIMATION )

So for this formative we had to create a 3D environment animation according to the following specifications.

Development Specifications

1. break object into elements for animation

2. Create an idle, an active, a Deactivate and 2 fidgets

animation should be all in one file

3. Render out the animation 320x240

So the environment prop I made was a gas mask keeping to the theme of World War 2.

As for the Normals this was my very first attempt at modelling in Z brush and retopologizing my low poly and transferring that into Maya. As a result my normal maps didn't really come out the way I had hoped. There was issues with stretching but over all it the end product was mainly for animation purposes.  

Animation

My idea for the model was that it would be an item you pick up in game. So as the player clicks onto the item it plays the short animation and get put into inventory.