10 Weapon Design Tips for 3d Artists

[Applause] weapon design is often an integral part of the game design pipeline with the vast majority of the most popular titles currently on the market being comprised of the first person shooter battle royale survival crafting and rpg genres the only exception in lieu of weapon design in the last year has been animal crossing but that could easily change so today we are going to discuss the top 10 tips for getting started with weapon design for games so we'll be covering some helpful tips best practices and some of the technical know-how of weapon design the first tip is pretty basic and that's to simply know your software in advance now you don't need to know all the ins and outs and bells and whistles of a program such as blender or zbrush or substance painter but it's a good idea to have at least a foundation of knowledge when it comes to working with whatever programs are gonna be in your workflow if you're set on learning blender then get started with the basics of poly modeling as you become more proficient you'll learn more advanced techniques and tools that are available in your program so if you're just getting started with blender go ahead and model a donut on top of a pillow on top of a chair and then smash that with an anvil so now that we have the basics out of the way it's time to launch into a crash course on weaponology you see this this is a weapon this is also a weapon this can be a weapon what you don't think this is a weapon think again there are a lot of different weapons out there there are big weapons there are small weapons there are weapons for smart people and there are weapons for stupid people but it's your job as the weapon artist to know a little bit about weapons so it's important to do some research beforehand a few of the basic questions you want to ask yourself before you get started with weapon design are who's going to use this weapon what sort of environment are they going to use it in who manufactured this weapon what sort of ammo does it use and so on if you're looking to learn more cynics recently did a light box talk discussing some of the basic principles behind weapon design i'll also leave a link to a helpful tutorial by daniel solovev on some of the basic functional considerations of weapon design as well as common beginner mistakes this tutorial is good because it shows the functional considerations that you will need to go over when designing firearms that are supposed to be used in a real world setting [Music] if you're designing weapons for a fictional environment using technology that doesn't actually exist it's still a good idea to have some idea of the basic functions and operations of the weapon mass effect was very good at giving a detailed explanation of how their weapons work and star wars also has a pretty strong internal logic as to how a blaster operates so on the topic of weapon functionality that brings us to our third tip and that is to gather a lot of reference when you're doing weapon design whether you're working on recreating a real world item or creating a fictionalized mashup of contemporary parts it's best to gather a lot of reference in advance to starting a weapon design i definitely recommend an open canvas app like pure ref to gather up all your reference in one place if you're working on a real world firearm it's best to know that there are a lot of variations between different models of weapons it's important to do a lot of research especially if you're working on something that's specific to a certain time period or setting let's take the mohsen nagant for example the mohsen nagant is a russian-designed bolt-action rifle initially concepted in 1891 and has since seen use throughout a number of conflicts including both world wars and even modern conflicts to this day and if you do a search of moss and nagant variants you can find that there are a lot of differences between where the rifle was assembled and what countries or conflicts it was used in now you might think an excruciating amount of attention paid to real-world detail is only applicable if you're working on a project that requires it such as the weapon designs for hell let loose or escape from tarkov and you might be right but it's still important to gather a lot of reference even if you're working on a concept design project this will simply help make your design a lot more believable if it's coming from a foundation of real world reference this brings us to our fourth tip which is consider your ammo unless you're working on melee weapons or something that's purely magical with no combustible energy to be expended then you're gonna have to give some consideration to the type of ammo that your weapon uses the type of ammunition that a weapon is meant to fire will always have a strong influence over the ergonomics and overall functional design of a firearm a large portion of a weapons design is all focused on compensating for the amount of recoil that is generated from firing whatever ammunition type it uses as a bonus tip your ammo can also serve as a perfect scale reference for starting a weapon design this is helpful if you're working on a concepted firearm or something that is just oddly specific and you're having a difficult amount of time finding accurate scale reference information for start by modeling a single round of ammunition to scale and then you can model the rest of your firearm design around that single round tip number five is to optimize your workspace in whatever 3d program you're using okay so i'm going to go over how i set up my workspace in blenner and i'm going to bring up a different file just so you can see what some of these changes do but just know that once you create these changes you can hit control u and save startup file and it'll save all these changes as your default startup file in blender so i'm going to bring up my recent weapon design and we're going to start with the viewport shading so if you come up here where you have your wireframe your viewport shading and then your material and rendered view if you hit the little down arrow here you'll bring up your viewport shading options if you're in the viewport shading mode so let's get started with a few of the changes we can make now by default you'll probably be in the studio lighting mode which has a few different presets and you can go for these and pick one that you like what i prefer to use are some of these default matte caps now the ones that i like to use are typically this ceramic dark dot exr which gives kind of a nice rim lighting to what you're working on and occasionally i'll switch that out between this and this more shiny we'll see what it's called ceramic light bulb which you see gives it a much more dramatic glossy like matte cap and that's just good to switch between these because you might notice that you have certain shading errors on one that you didn't notice on the other next we'll go into a few of the viewport shading options and first of all i always like to turn on backface calling just because it's a good practice and i'll tell you why so let's uh select a part here and i'm going to turn back face culling off so i'll select everything and i don't know why this stock parts joined to the scope but okay so i got everything selected and i'm just going to flip the normals okay so something changed but we can't exactly tell what so i'm gonna hide a portion of this and as you can see you know we did this flip normals and maybe you can't tell right away that there's something odd about your shading but if we go ahead and we turn back face culling on we can see oh oh so the normals are all facing inside they're all facing the wrong direction on this particular part okay so we know then to select everything actually we'll unhide what we selected and we'll just recalculate the normals by hitting shift n and then we're back to normal as for some of the next few settings i typically don't use cavity maybe unless i'm a sculpting and i don't use depth of field but i do like to check on outline which gives each individual part just a little subtle outline around them it just kind of helps separate what you're looking at but that brings us to a setting that i use a lot more and that would be this random color now by default it's set to material which gives everything this gray material matte cap but if you go to random it gives everything a random color which just helps you see how all the parts in your scene are separated but as you can see a lot of these parts are all getting what is basically the same color which is why i like to turn on the outline so if we go to flat which will gives it which gives it absolutely no material matte cap you can see okay so it's got this outline around all the parts if you go to material see you can just clearly see that there's an outline so i'll set this to what are basically my preferred matte cap settings which is matte cap the dark ceramic and random color and now we'll talk about a few other things you can do in the viewport and we'll go to these viewport overlays which is uh right here if you check this button on and off you can turn off things like the floor the highlighting of different objects and all that and then you can change the settings in this little drop down arrow and there are a few other things that i really like to turn on in here now occasionally i like to turn off the floor and uncheck the grid the x and y axis which are shown by default but you can turn those back on and one thing i definitely like to turn on is these statistics and i've had a lot of people actually ask me about this in blender that's how you turn on all the object or scene statistics over here in the corner now typically these things are on in the bottom toolbar where it shows all the stats and memory usage for your scene you can turn those off and on now in blender 2.9 which is nice but i like to keep this information just in the up handed corner it's just easier to kind of reference as i'm working along a few other things that are nice to use in this little area is that you can turn on a wire frame which is useful as you can see this is my high poly model and it's great to bring up that wire frame while you're working and the next thing i'm going to correct is something that's already bothering me a whole lot and you'll notice that as i'm zooming into this model that portions of it are disappearing as it gets closer to our view and this whole model is set up to be the proper scale for this gun and this is really annoying if you're trying to model a very small area and you're zooming in and the whole model is just disappearing in your viewport so to correct that this is pretty important just hit n on the keyboard go to view and you have this clip start which is the parameter for the distance from your viewport that the model begins to flip out like this and by default i believe it's usually set to 0.1 meters here so i'm just gonna set that to what i believe is yeah one millimeter hit enter and now you can see i can zoom way in and we do not have that clipping issue next i'm going to talk briefly about add-ons but i don't want to go too in-depth into this it's something that i could really make a whole nother video about but as you can see i have hard ops and box cutter over here in the corner and those are two paid add-ons that are just really good to have especially if you are working on hard surface 3dr uh for the default add-ons that are available when you download blender i definitely recommend going into your preferences and turning on basically everything that includes extra objects so if i go to shift a you'll see that i have a lot of extra objects turned on so you have pipe joints gears bolts these are all a little architecture arc mesh pack these are all very helpful to have the ones i use a lot are these extra curve objects you can find a lot of different uses especially if you're doing more non-destructive modeling use these so you can go into your preferences and you can experiment with the add-ons that are available by default you don't have to use everything i actually don't like to use a whole lot of add-ons especially ones that might uh totally rearrange the button keys that i'm used to uh but there's a lot of stuff that can still really help speed up your workflow there are also a lot of very good add-ons for the uv editing end of blender so i'm going to turn on one of these low polys that's already uv unwrapped and i'm going to go to the uv editing workspace that's already got the material set up cool i'll just hit everything that's linked to this material and if i go into edit mode select everything you can see just how tightly packed all these uv islands are and that's because of this add-on here which is uv pack master ii which will really help reduce the amount of unused space on your one-to-one uv graph tip number six is to start from the simplest form possible when designing anything in 3d it's usually a good idea to start as basic as possible and for me i like to start using only 2d planes to cut out the basic shapes of the weapon except for things like the barrel gas tubes in stock in which i'll drop in cylinders for everything else will be like a paper-thin mesh until i have a complete cutout of the weapon's shape then i'll extrude the planes to the proper width and begin modeling from there now this isn't the only way to start modeling but i highly recommend working in a method that allows you to quickly establish the proper scale and forms for whatever it is you're modeling try to work on your weapon designs holistically and steadily refine as you build up from the basic forms now that we've got our basic block out started for our web design it's time to start talking about some of your geometry considerations now this can be a much broader topic but i'm going to try and cover the basics when creating weapon designs for games it's often a good idea to work from high to low this involves creating a highly dense high topology model that can be later down rest into something suitable for a game engine environment when working on your low poly mesh it's important to make sure that you retain enough geometry to encompass all the high poly details that will get baked down into your normal map now it's best to avoid n-gons wherever possible and although your model will be triangulated once it's exported to your game engine if at any point between exports your triangulation method is changed you run the risk of changing the pole order on your geometry which will ruin the baked detail in your normal maps another thing you might have to consider when it comes to your geometry are lots or level of detail meshes lods essentially involves creating iterations of lower detail meshes of your weapon that when imported into a game engine will be used for your weapon when it's further away from the player's camera when creating lots you'll want to reduce your geometry as much as possible between iterations but you'll want to retain enough geometry so that their uvs can retain texture information ultimately your considerations when it comes to geometry will vary from project to project as will your considerations when it comes to materials which is tip number eight your considerations when it comes to materials are all going to depend on what render pipeline that you're using but for a basic understanding of the physically based rendering pipeline i definitely recommend checking out the pbr guide on substance academy overall the most prominent texturing applications on the market are easy to jump into but tricky to master but regardless of what texturing application you're using it's important to gather a lot of material reference whether you're working on a real world weapon or something that's fictionalized finding good texture reference can often be more difficult than finding good reference for the weapon itself you'll often need to get creative and even create a separate section or folder of your reference just dedicated to material reference on a given project when working in a texturing program like substance painter you don't need to have a very advanced understanding but it's always important to ask yourself whether the detail you're creating makes sense so when working on a weapon design think of the areas where dirt grime or corrosion would logically build up and try not to go overboard with things like edgewear rust or smudges in addition to finding good tutorials and courses on texturing i would also highly recommend finding other people's models that you can download and examining how they set up and create their own texture maps there are a lot of high quality free assets that you can download from places like cubrush or the unreal marketplace i like to download a lot of these just to examine how professional artists do things like their geometry and topology and closely examine the texture maps and materials that they create tip number nine has to do with your game play and animation considerations although these tasks will often be handled by other artists in the game development pipeline there are still some important considerations in terms of optimization when it comes to weapon design for games animators will need to be able to work with your weapon in conjunction with character animations so that they can create things like the shooting recoil and reload animations you might also have to consider a few other unique gameplay functions such as if the weapon can be customized or modified whether the weapon will be given different skins and of course the overall coolness factor for being used in game and finally tip number 10 is to get feedback it's important to get good quality feedback preferably from other artists who are currently working in the video game industry while there are a lot of good online communities that you can join two that i would highly recommend are the dynasty empire discord and the poly count form it's a good idea to join one or more of these communities especially if you're an artist who's working in an area where there aren't other video game studios or local artists that you can get feedback from these communities are a good place to learn and grow from other professional artists and also give helpful feedback to people who are in the same league as your own if you found any of the tips in this video useful then now you should be ready to boot up your 3d program of choice and lock and load if you enjoyed the video please consider subscribing and hitting the bell icon to receive a notification whenever i post a new video so thanks for watching good luck getting those projects done and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Tosmo

Views: 26,036

Keywords: Blender 3d, Blender tutorial, Blender 2.8, 3d art, game art, concept art, weapon design, 3d modeling tips, first person shooters, fps games, game design, game development, Tosmo, firearms, unity engine, unreal engine, substance painter tutorial, pbr materials blender, LODs, escape from tarkov, doom eternal, animal crossing new horizons, 3d modeling, guns, rifles, shotgun, semi automatic shotgun, FNC, Bayonet, 3ds max, 3d modeling software

Id: yvC5Xq3jjBM

Length: 21min 5sec (1265 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020