High Poly Rifle Creation Process
Before I actually started building the air rifle, I wanted to import some images of the rifle to help guide the build. To do this I placed a side image of the rifle on a plane that I had made with the with the exact same dimensions as the image. This made sure that I had the correct proportions to have an accurate reference image. The above image depicts the final result. The final step that I took was to scale it down in Maya to a more realistic size.
The first part of this rifle I wanted to ‘attack’ was the scope. I thought about this for a while and decided the best option for the body was to create a cylinder and manipulate it’s edges to get a similar shape as the scope. I used the reference image here to get the length, width and overall shape as accurate as I could.
Here I made the scope turrets using the extrude tool. The next step was to take out those small grooves on the side of the turret. I decided to do this method with a Boolean. Counting the segments, I made the same number of circles in a perfect circle. I extruded these circles to make a series of cylinders. I lined it up with the scope turret, scaled it and selected the Boolean option “subtraction”. I removed object A (cylinders) from object B (scope turret).
With the new turrets now completed I wanted to place them onto the scope. I made a simple cube to create the bed the turrets will sit on. Like everything else on the scope/rifle, I used the rifle image in the background as a reference to know where to place the elements. I scaled the cube exactly as it appears in the image and put the top turret on top again using the image as reference. I lowered the turret until the entire circumference was below the cube. For the second one, I made a copy and rotated it 90 degrees and placed it in the centre of the cube to the right. This now concluded the modelling process for the middle portion of the scope.
Working on the scope body further to improve its realism and look, I dabbled with Nurbs (one image above) but decided to stick with polygons. Here I made the scope hollow as I thought it would be good that light could pass through it and so I could add glass lenses to be realistic.
The final part on the scope body itself was the cylinder type shape that would be used for magnification of the lenses. I created a spline (or curve) that mimicked the exterior shape of the element and used a revolve modifier. Just like the turrets, this element had several ridges (for grip). I therefore used the Boolean method to achieve this look. I made another copy of the circle of cylinders and sized them in relation to this and cut the grooves out.
The final components to the scope were the mounts. I took pictures of the scope mounts, got the exterior selection in Photoshop and exported the paths to Illustrator so I could import them into MAYA as curves. With the lines now in MAYA, I could use a loft modifier to create the shapes. There were three main components to this object. I lofted them all the exact same distance. This now created perfect representations of the real world mounts.
For the scope mount bolt holes I used different sized cylinders and a Boolean to remove the amount of material that was not needed. With the mount parts now completed, I moved onto creating the bolts themselves. To keep true to the real life version, I wanted to make Allen head type bolts. I made a hexagram (six sided star) spline and attached it to a circle. This now created the shape that I could extrude. I extruded it to the correct length for it to fit inside the mount and manipulated its scale to be much narrower near the end. Though this might not even been seen, I thought it was good practice which taught me good techniques. (I made this object in 3ds MAX as I couldn’t get the circle and hexagon to work properly)
With all the components of the mount complete, I placed them all together. I made several copies of the bolts and lined them up perfectly. I added the bolts to the bottom part of the mount as well. Using the reference image I placed one mount in the correct position. I then copied it all and dragged the second to the left for the final mount.
This marked the end to the modelling of the scope. One final step to improve the eye pieces were the ‘lenses’. I experimented with using different structures for these. I felt that a single flat plane wasn’t good enough. Therefore, to get a consistent curved lens I made a large sphere and removed all the polygons that were outside of the scope body. I was now left with nice curved glass that looked very nice and improved the ‘accuracy’ of the scope. (I later changed both ends to be partial sphere to have complete geometry.)
With the scope now fully complete (apart from textures) I decided to move onto the stock of the rifle. The first method I tried was the same as the scope mounts. I took a picture of the rifle into Photoshop and got the selection of the outside and exported it as a path for illustrator. Importing it into MAYA, I could further manipulate it. I lofted the shape which can be seen in the second image above. However there was one major problem with the resulting model. The side face was only one polygon. Not only was this over 4 sides, it meant I couldn’t manipulate it to suit the curve to the side of the stock. Overall this meant that I had to abandon this stock idea. I instead decided to build the stock from a single rectangle block with sufficient geometry.
I created a rectangle that fitted exactly over the height and width extremes of the rifle image. Here the reference image was once again absolutely crucial. From the front view only I shaped the vertices of the box around the scope body. This made the same model as the first attempt except it had geometry everywhere where I needed. Once the side view of the stock was roughly in place, I moved onto the sides where I could add the curve. Selecting the vertices on the outside edges I pulled them outwards which would create this curve once smoothing was applied. My only regret so far about this new stock was that I should have used symmetry to save time.
I wanted to have all aspects of the model done before I try and perfect its shape. The only thing that was missing was the trigger guard. I thought that the best way to do this was a Boolean. Using the lines I had made earlier in Photoshop, I made a shape that was exactly the same as the interior trigger line. I placed this through the trigger (seen top left) and subtracted it from the rifle. I was left with the shape I wanted but I had to do a lot of tweaking since the Boolean did a ‘messy’ job. After a while of target welding, connecting and deleting vertices I was left with a nice looking guard. The result can be seen in the second image above. I also extruded some of the polygons upwards just at the base of the stock in the middle of the guard. This gave room for the actual trigger and was more realistic.
The other part to the scope was the trigger itself. Like most of the other parts on this rifle I used the image to guide the modelling. I made a rectangle with several divisions so that I could shape the curve of the trigger. The simple polygon model can be seen in the first two images above. I changed the width of the trigger to suit the trigger guard and placed the top part of the trigger inside the small groove I had created earlier. This made it look much better and I was happy with the overall result. The final trigger can be seen above in the third image.
With the stock and trigger now complete, I wanted to make subtle fine adjustments to the stock. To get the width change at the back of the stock I changed the vertices positions to be thinner and wider at the appropriate points. This is where symmetry would have been best but I unfortunately didn’t use it here. I used a combination of reference images and holding the stock in my hands for reference.
The finishing of the stock marked the beginning of the metal parts of the rifle. This included the housing and barrel. To start off the housing I made a cylinder that was the exact same length as it was in the reference image. This was a fairly easy and quick process. To enhance the detail of the model and to make it more realistic I extruded some of the material inwards to make the ‘rails’ for the scope mounts to go into. It was the same extrusion each side of the cylinder which can be seen in the second image above.
With these new rails finished, I had to now adjust the position of the mounts to fit inside. I made sure everything was attached to the scope then just simply dragged them downwards so they sat snug inside the new created space. I had to do small adjustments to the mount to get it to fit perfect but it worked well in the end. You may not be able to see, but the second image depicts the rendered result of the scope mounts inside the cylinder grooves. (I did the renders in Max)
The next part on the ‘production line’ was the rifle’s safety latch and dust cover which is positioned near the rear of the spring housing (closest to shooter). These parts were relatively small which meant the camera wouldn’t be getting too close to them. However I still wanted them to be true to the real life versions. I started on the dust cover to begin with. The best solution to make this I found was to first make a sphere. I placed it into position to get the curve at the back; I then cut the sphere in half where it met the spring housing. I extruded one ring of polygons outwards to create the ridge. Holding shift, I dragged the last edges along to create the straight section seen above. Overall this made a cylinder type shape with a hemisphere top like an R2D2. I lined it up with the reference image and placed it into the rifle. Next I had to make space for the actual safety latch; I extruded some of the polygons downwards to have the slight inset. Like the scope mounts, I drew a spline of the latch and extruded it to create a three dimensional one. I then only had to scale it, line it up and place it inside the dust cover. I did notice afterwards however, that there were 2 large Ngons. I connected multiple vertices to resolve this. This area of the rifle was now finished.
The next parts of the rifle to be made were the barrel components. To start, I used reference images to get the correct size of the receiver. Since this was a nice and simple part to the rifle I just used a rectangle editable poly to make the main part. The only adjustments that I made were to the top of the receiver. I extruded upwards and made the scale smaller. This gave a nice taper to the part around the end. Only the parts towards the front of the rifle didn’t have this taper feature. This can be seen in image two above.
The barrel was the final part of this rifle. To create this I made a doughnut spline that was accurate to the thickness of the barrel. By this I mean that the size of the hole was very similar to the real version in relation to overall size of the barrel. Just like the scope, a loft modifier was used here. I made the new object to be the exact length of the barrel using the reference image. In the loft modifier panel, when I clicked “get shape” and clicked on the doughnut, the barrel appeared.
In real life at the end of the barrel, there is a slight taper. It has no sharp finish like the loft originally had. To replicate this in MAYA, I bevelled the end of the barrel both its interior and exterior.
The first thing I would do differently next time would be using paths and the loft tool to create shapes. Though the shapes were very accurate, the geometry created is not very good. Two sides of the shape was one polygon with resulted in an Ngon that had hundreds of edges. I tried my best to clean this up by adding edges to keep quad geometry but even then I still had triangles. I believe doing just box modelling here would have been the faster and easier method.
Another thing that I would not have used as much is Booleans. There are very useful for creating shapes fast by subtracting one from another but they make a huge mess with the geometry. This resulted in hours of cleaning up once more to try and achieve quad polygons. It may have also been even better to not model the grooves at all but to have a smooth edge and just use textures later on to create an illusion that grooves were there. This also would have resulted in far less polygons.
Extra changes and additions I made to the model include the scope body and the scope mount backstop. I realised that the scope adjusters and bed were actually machined as one part so I created a box with equal columns/rows and attached the dials to it (1st image above). A second improvement was that I noticed I forgot to add the mount backstop. I box modelled this using references images and added half a sphere which could be textured as a screw later.
Other small additions include the screw hole on the side of the stock and at the rear. I also extrude a line of polygons inwards to create the groove which can also be seen.
In order to achieve accurate texture maps on my rifle, the UV’s need to be created in an intuitive and correct manner. To help me with this process I first placed a “Checker” map on the object I was manipulating. This allowed me to ‘check’ for any distortion on the texture and also helped with alignment. Before I got into the actual texturing process, I went over all the objects on the rifle and created the UV’s. For each object, I assigned a Blind and a descriptive name. For example, if I was manipulating the bolts on the scope mounts, I would name the blind as follows; Rifle_Scope_Mounts_Bolt_shd. For as much as possible, I tried to make each square on the texture remain in that square shape when creating the UV’s. There was however minimal distortion on some of the textures but I tried to place this in an area where the camera or viewer would be least likely to look. E.g. On the underside of an object. For the most part I used the automatic unwrap tool as I felt this gave me the most control over my UVs. I would then stich together parts which I felt looked best in the viewport. The seams, just like any distortion was hidden away as much as possible.
Now that I was happy with the UV’s, I could move onto the textures themselves. The rifle I was basing this model off is still brand new so there is not much I could explore. I decided to try and make the gun look as old, cruddy and in poor condition as possible. For each major component on the rifle, I created a PSD network so that I could work on the textures in Photoshop and see the results in Maya instantly. To help speed up this process, I added the “Update PSD Network” in my custom shelf as I was going to press this button very frequently. For the textures, I collected many from the internet which contain metal, grime/grunge, metal and wood. I especially looked for ones that are seamless so I could scale them accordingly. Below are a few raw textures I used in my model.
The main rules I tried to adhere to when texturing my rifle was to avoid repeating patterns and get a consistent scale. In Photoshop, I used various blends and the healing brush tool to remove any significant marks on a texture so it was much harder to notice the repeating pattern. The second rule was that I tried to get a consistent scale of the textures on the entire rifle. The detail in the images can affect how ‘large’ the rifle looks to the viewer. In addition to this, I tried adding wear and tear to the most used parts on the rifle. For example, where the finger rests on the trigger, it is much smoother. Another example would be the stock. I desaturated the areas where the hand of the user touches most to get a worn look.
I added grime and dirt where I thought it was most likely to appear. This was mainly at seams between objects and even at the end of the barrel where gunpowder and residue would collect from the firing of the gun. For the bump maps, I used the same RGB image but turned it black and white and altered some of the colours. These were mainly the places where the dirt appears. I wanted the dirt to stand out slightly so I painted this in Photoshop. I toned down the amount of bump deformation to a more reasonable amount. Just like the scale of the textures, I tried to keep the amount of bump consistent throughout the entire rifle.
Overall I learnt a lot in general to do with Maya. I am coming much more comfortable with its layout and am asking more of why I should do something rather than how. The toughest thing I think in this project was creating the UVs. Of course there is no perfect way to create any one UV but I was finding it tough to get it perfect. There seemed to be always a bit of distortion somewhere on the object. I did learn however how to mask these distortions with the textures themselves. It wasn’t until later in the UV process I found out how to make the seams myself by selecting edges. I wish I knew this as the beginning as it would have given me complete control over the UVs’. It might also be good for the future to have more of the objects sharing the same texture map. A lot of my textures were only partially used so therefore it would have saved me from making 13/14 separate maps/PSD’s. I feel that this project has definitely improved my modeling capability and my proficiency in Maya