Modeling an AK-47 in Blender (Part 1: Grip) (Aryan)

I'm going to show you how to make a game ready AK-47 and blender this is episode one we're going to talk about the hand grip first every tool and technique you're going to see me use in this video is in my new ebook so you can check it out below here's the first thing you have to do go to Google Search and type in AK47 or whatever other gun you're trying to make then hit enter and if you click on images you're going to get a whole bunch of pictures of an AK-47 and a bunch of different contexts and you need to look for a picture which is going to give you a perfect side view of the AK-47 in this example right here we can see the left side over here and we can see the right side on top here and this is good because we can see the dimensions and everything you guys convince me to start using this program called Pure ref and this is just something where you can copy paste images into it you can keep it on your screen so you can use this as references when you're modeling I'm not going to show you where to get that just Google pure ref and you'll be all right and I want to get a few more pictures of the AK-47 where it's not just a side view but maybe it's somebody holding the gun or something and that way you can get a better idea of how thick it is here's a dude that made the AK-47 I wonder if he ever killed somebody with it now once you got a couple of pictures of the AK-47 you can start working you can always add more pictures just go to Google and look for something else at some point in the future you're probably going to need some more close-ups of the tip of the barrel or the sights or whatever we'll cross that bridge when we get there for now I'm going to put my reference pictures over here in the corner but I'm also going to copy this picture of the AK-47 from the side I'm going to paste that into some image editing program like paint net and that way I can save the image to my computer so I can use it as a background it's going to act like a blueprint and we're going to get into blender and we're going to place this pure ref window over here in the corner I'm going to cover the outliner cuz let's be honest nobody ever uses this [ __ ] thing so we can just put our references over here if you have a second monitor it's probably better to put it there but if you don't then you can just put it up here now we're going to go to side view we're going to go to shift a image reference and you're going to load up the picture of your AK47 now it's placed in the background you can also make it a little bit more transparent so it's a bit easier to look at and once it's in the scene just push it in the background we're going to use this image to determine how long this is how wide this is we're going to measure the model based on this picture now delete the default Cube add in a new plane and align it with your view then we're going to place that little plane on top of this hand grip over here and we're just going to scale it down and move some of the vertices around we're going to use this plane to shape out the side profile of the hand grip so we're going to have to add a loop gut over here and we're going to have to add some extra geometry all over the place so we can shape this thing properly and first I'm going to shape out the inner surface over here and then I'll extrude out this part which gives me a bevel which makes the whole thing a bit smooth and round I'll extrude this part down a couple of times and at the end here we're going to extrude an edge to make this little part that sticks out down here then we're going to use our Loop tools to clean up this geometry a little bit if you don't have your Loop tools active go up here to edit preferences add-ons and search for Loop tools and just check this box right here now the reason I activated my Loop tools is cuz I want to select these two Edge loops and with W I'll go to Loop tools space and that's going to make all these edges equally long and it's going to make the geometry look a little bit more clean so now I can take this Edge over here and I can extrude it out so it aligns with the blueprint in the back here then I'll extrude these edges down here and the reason I didn't extrude this one is so I can fill this and keep a nice flow of faces over here so that when I subdivide this it's going to look pretty nice we're also going to extrude all this stuff over here in the front fill this and just move some vertices around until they roughly match the Hang RP now notice how I designed this face Loop so that it goes all the way from back here it goes all the way around the H grip and then over here it ends it doesn't go up here this is going to allow me to add a bevel over here once I have a subdivision surface modifier if I'm going to use a subdivision surface modifier and it's just going to give me better control over the mesh and once we have a rough low poy shape for this thing we're going to have to shoot it out to give it some thickness now there's no way that I can tell from the references that I currently have exactly how thick this is supposed to be and this going to be really important because it can [ __ ] up the entire workflow later on so we're going to go back to Google and if you search something like AK-47 blueprint you're going to get pictures of the AK-47 from all different perspectives for example this picture right here shows me the AK from the side from the top and from the other side as well which means I can use this to determine the width of the hand grip so I'm just going to copy that I'm going to paste it onto new canvas and paint net and currently it's super thin so first of all I'm going to invert the colors on this and I'm going to separate all these perspectives so I can save them as separate images and that way I'll be able to use them in blender to give me all the different perspectives of the gun now I need to replace the background image with my blueprint because I can no longer use this one cuz it's not going to perfectly align with the blueprint I'm going to move this out of the way shift a image reference and we're going to load up the other pictures so this is one blueprint right here I'm going to align that with the hand grip that I already made so it matches approximately and once I place that in the background I'm also going to add in my top image which is the most important one here now it's very important that the top image shows me the same scale as the right side or the left side image right now when I added the top image it doesn't have the same length as the other picture so it's going to completely [ __ ] up my model so to fix that I'm going to add a little bit of transparency on both of these pictures so I can see them better then I'm going to place the tip of the bayonet at the tip of the other bayonet in the other picture I'll place the 3D cursor at the tip right there then I'll set the piver point to the 3D cursor and with this top image selected I can now scale it from this exact point which means it won't move from this point over here but it's just going to get bigger and once I have that in place I can scale this up and align the backs of the butt stalk and that way I can make sure that this is the exact same scale that I'm looking at here now we can just rotate this around the Y AIS and we can push it down so that from Top View we have a perfect reference now based on the references that we have from before you can tell that the hand grip is supposed to be thinner than the receiver and you can also tell that the top of the hand grip is a bit wider than the rest of the hand grip so to make things simpler first of all we're going to delete one entire side of this handp grip then we're going to add a mirror modifier to the hand grip and that way we can easily control the thickness by just moving one side of the geometry and now from Top View we're going to make this a little bit thinner than the receiver the top part of the hand grip is probably supposed to be somewhere around here which means the lower part is supposed to be around here now the new reference that I'm using shows me a slightly different shape so I'm going to have to adjust this hand grip to that shape so I'm just going to move some of the geometry around a little bit to correct this this needs to be a straight gut but it has to sit at a bit of an angle cuz this is not perfectly straight so I'm going to use my knife tool a click up here here then I'll pull it down here and I'll press C so I can cut through and once I click down here I'll hit enter and that's going to give me a loop cut straight through this entire shape then I'll just cut off the part in the front and later when I apply my mirror modifier I'll be able to grid fill this with clean geometry we're also going to move some of these vertices into place down here we're also going to have to straighten out this [ __ ] on top so once again K click here C to cut through then click over here then hit enter and delete all this [ __ ] at the top and once again we're going to fill that in with a grid fill afterwards I think this line in the blueprint over here shows us where that the hand grip is supposed to be thicker in the reference this is this line over here that's what I'm thinking right now maybe I'm wrong I don't know but who gives a [ __ ] as long as it looks good so we're going to move this geometry aside and I'm just going to add another loop cut from here to over here with C to cut through and then I can take this whole surface from the side over here extrude right click and ALT s to push it outwards a little bit we're still going to add some subdivision surface to this to control the shape a little bit better but this is how we need to shape the geometry now with control one we can add some subdivision surface and once we have the subdivision surface we're probably going to have to take this entire Edge loop on the outside here and slide it with double g inwards a little bit to make this shape more round we can also apply the mirror modifier now so we can fill in this other [ __ ] and the easiest way to fill this is if we disable the subdivision for a second we're going to select these two Edge Loops over here W Bridge Edge Loops in Edge select mode then just add a loop gut down the middle and merge vertices by distance my shortcut for that is shift W but if you don't have a shortcut FL that go up here to mesh merge merge by distance and that's going to turn all the vertices which you're in the same place into one single vertex now we can select this Edge Loop over here face grid fill and you might have to adjust the span or the offset a little bit to make this line perfectly but it's going to give you a clean quad only filling up here now back to subdivision surface we're going to select all these Edge Loops over here as well as this Edge Loop up here and the reason we're doing that is so we can go to control B to add a small bevel here we're going to set the shape to one and the number of segments has to be two this way this is going to control how round this part is because of the subdivision surface obviously this is supposed to be quite sharp maybe we want the bevel to be a little bit thicker so I'm going to make mine something like this because of the bevel I got some [ __ ] up overlapping on my geometry over here so I'll select this surface I'll scale it down a little bit so I don't have any overlapping on the side I'm going to have to do the same thing back here now I don't know if this is supposed to be this round or a little bit flatter but I kind of like how it looks if I add Loop guts over here and then I get rid of this Loop gut in here it just makes this surface a little bit more flat and I think it looks a bit better it doesn't matter these are tiny details it don't matter no one's going to shoot you in the head for not doing this correctly just do whatever looks best for your purpose now the subdivision surface makes this shape look a lot nicer than before but it also added a whole bunch of geometry to the shape so when we applied the subdivision surface modifier we're going to have to remove some of the edge Loops we're going to have to dissolve some of the geometry because otherwise we're just going to have way too many polygons so to do that you can just use alt right click or shift alt right click to select a bunch of edge Loops like this then press X dissolve edges and try to select the ones which you can remove without making a visible difference on the mesh for example I can easily remove these Edge loops and it's still going to look more or less the same I can also get rid of this one and maybe this one up here and I definitely don't need this many horizontal Edge loops on the hand grip now the subdivision surface modifier helped us make this mesh a little bit smoother and rounder it just reshaped it a little bit but then I removed some geometry because I don't want to have too much geometry so I kind of tried to get a balance between having a nice smooth and round shape but not having too much geometry to [ __ ] up the whole thing obviously if you want to you can add more subdivision surface to this if you want to make it look nicer but you don't have to do that it's up to you how many polygon you're trying to have on this anyway adding more subdivision is not going to change the look of this too much this is what it looks like with one level of subdivision at the moment and this is what it looks like with no subdivision so there's only a slight difference in the shading and I think for a game it's probably not even worth it now we got to texture this thing so there's going to be four things that we have to do for this first things first we're going to have to UV unwrap this then we're going to have to find the wood texture then we're going to have to create this nerling on the side and finally we're going to have to texture paint some of this [ __ ] whatever this says on the top here so so let's start by UV unw wrapping this switch over to the shading workspace zoom in on this and add a new material we're going to name this material UV test and in this new material we're going to add a new image texture node in the image texture node click on new name that UV grid set the resolution to 2048x 2048 and set the generated type to UV grid after you generate that plug the color into the base color of the principal node and now this is going to be visible on the hand grip at the moment we can see our UV map is completely [ __ ] because we have all the stretching and Distortion so we're going to fix that by UV unwrapping it properly the reason for this UV grid is so we can see if we unwrap this correctly or not so first of all we're going to separate these flat surfaces on the top and the bottom we're going to Mark The Edge loops around those and we're also going to separate them with an extra Edge Loop over here then we're going to press CR E mark seam and that'll take care of that now we still have this part at the bottom down here the best way to unwrap this would to be split it into two sides unwrap the side on the left and unwrap the side on the right but the problem is we can't do that because we don't have a loop gun in the middle which which we can cut so obviously we can just add a loop gut deselect all this stuff at the top of that Loop gut cuz we don't want to mark that as a seam then contr E mark seam select everything you unwrap and you can see the UV map looks pretty good on this now we just have to replace this UV GID with a wood texture so let's go to Google in a new tab search for textures.com and in the PBR material section we're going to look for some wood you can find a wood various category over here and here you got a whole bunch of different types of wood now here's what the hand grip looks like and if we scroll down a little bit we can find a couple of examples of something similar for example this material right here looks pretty similar to the material on the hand GD this might be a little bit better because it's not going to have little tiny lines as the other texture so we might also be able to use this on the butt stock now it looks like the butt stock and the hand grip are the same texture but the butt stock unlike the hand grip has wood grain on it you can see some of the lines over here so we need to find the texture which also has that so I think the best thing to do would be to use a combination of a nice clean wood like this and something a bit more rough like this one one over here and to do that I'm going to download the color texture from this one over here and by the way I can change the color it's not going to be this red don't worry about it and I'm going to download the normal map and the roughness map from this other texture over here now the resolution of this Redwood texture was pretty low we can also fix that so here's a 2,000 IQ trick to fix that you're going to go to this website called upscale do media by pixel.io there's a bunch of these types of website they're all the same [ __ ] most of them are free to use and they're not even paying me to say this and this website will allow you to take a low resolution image and turn it into a high resolution in so if you just have a shitty texture you can turn it into a pretty nice texture it says it uses some AI to make it a bit sharper and to generate some new stuff I don't know if it's really AI or what it is but anyway it just gives you some nice high quality textures which is pretty useful because sometimes it's pretty hard to find high resolution images so click over here on upload image then load your image in here and you're going to have to wait a couple of seconds once the processing is finished you can choose some options by default the upscale factor is two which means if you put in a 512 x 512 image you're going to get out of 1024 x 1024 image you can also change that to four times there's another option which lets you enhance the quality I don't know what it does and you can also preview the close-ups of this to see what this looks like I don't really give a [ __ ] about these details so I'm just going to download the image cuz I want 1024 now we're going to apply this material to the hand grip so first of all we're going to take this UV test material we're going to click on this little Shield so that way when we remove it from this object it's not going to disappear we're still going to have that material somewhere and that's going to let us use it on other objects later on now create a new material called hand grip and go to shift a image texture node and open up the texture that we just downloaded when you plug that into base color you're going to see the texture on your hand grip right now it looks like [ __ ] cuz it's not rotated properly but an easy way to fix that is you can use your node Wrangler so go to edit preferences add-ons clear the search and in the search box type in node Wrangler just check this add-on and once you do that you can select the image texture node press contrl T that's going to give you some new nodes which you can use to map the image so in the rotation area of this mapping node we're going to set the Z rotation to 90° or you can adjust it even further manually to just make these lines look a little bit better once we have that we're going to add another image texture node and we're going to open up the other texture Maps which we downloaded a second ago here we have a roughness map so we have to set that to non- color plug that into roughness that's going to control the roughness of our texture a little bit better then lastly we're going to add a normal map and you can do that by just clicking and dragging it from the downloads folder also set that non- color add a normal map node run the color through the normal map node and plug that [ __ ] into normal in the principal node now we also have a little normal map on this texture which looks pretty good now I told you guys you can control the color of this texture right now it's a little bit too red maybe you like this but probably want to make this a little bit more Brown to give it the classic AK color so to do that just move these color nodes to the side add a hue saturation value node place that in between these two nodes and you can control the Hue to give this a different color for example I'm going to set the Hue to 0.53 or maybe 0.52 and that's going to make this a bit more Brown you can also al control the value to make it darker if you want to but now we're just splitting hairs it's up to you what you want to do with this next a better way to do this would probably be to change the texture in an external program because otherwise we're going to have to add this node to every single material for example when we have the hand grip or the butt stock we're also going to have to add this extra node here if we change the image itself then we don't have to add this extra node so I'm going to do that instead in paint net I'm going to open up this image I'll go to adjustments Hue saturation I'll change the Hue by giving it a value of 10 or 11 or 12 then reduce the lightness a little bit to make it a bit darker save this image okay and in blender we're just going to refresh this now you can get rid of the saturation nodes and plug this into base color I just wanted to show you guys that you can use the saturation note and it's pretty useful sometimes now we need two more little details of this handrb to make it perfect first of all we're going to have to add this nerling as a normal map here so to do that let's first create an area onto which we're going to apply this nerling as you can see it's defined by perfectly straight lines it goes all the way from down here to up here so we're going to select this face control shift right click on this face and make sure to do that on both sides of the object for example we're going to move these edges around a little bit this is something we probably should have thought about a little bit earlier because now it's going to [ __ ] up our UV map a little bit but it doesn't matter too much cuz we can always just UV unwrap it again just to keep things clean I'm also going to G stretch these vertical Edge Loops right here so w Loop tools G stretch project and now this looks pretty good I'm going to select all the edges around these surfaces that I just created I'll mark them as seams and I'm once again going to UV unwrap everything and now going to need a normal map for this nerling I'm going to be an [ __ ] and I'm not going to show you how to do that in this video because I already have a tutorial that shows you how to make nerling in blender go watch that video really quick it's super simple you're basically just modeling the nerling and baking it as a normal map now we're going to apply that nerling to this surface alone so with these two surfaces selected you're going to create a new material slot you're going to load the same hand grip material here and then you're going to click on this little duplicate [ __ ] over here and that's going to create a new version of this same material it just duplicated it we're going to rename this to hand grip nerling and in this new material we're going to load in our nerling normal map which we created in the other tutorial I already have a normal map here from before so I'm going to have to combine that with the normal map of the nurl this is the first normal map for the wood texture I'm going to bring this one over here I'll set that to non color then add a new node which is called mixed color plug the nerling normal map into color a and plug the wood normal map into color B then take the result and put that into the color of the normal map node and you're going to have to assign this material to this object one once you sign this you're going to see the nerling pattern on this part of the object we're going to select the nerling texture add a node Wrangler and that way we can increase the scale we're going to set the scale to something like five on all axes and that's going to give us the right size for this nerling you can use the factor to control how strong this nerling is going to be but we're also going to need an extra little Edge over here so we're going to slightly inset both of these surfaces and we're going to select these new tiny little face loops around here we're going to apply the initial hand grip material that we had from before clear the outer seams around this area by selecting them press CR e clear seene now we can add a loop cut to the middle of these little face Loops select that new Loop cut and just use alt s to push it inwards a little bit then we're going to select all these edges around this little face Loop contr e Mark Sharp and in the object data properties you're going to go to normals click on auto smooth and just crank that [ __ ] all the way up now we have a tiny little border but you could have also made this with a normal M and now we're going to have to texture paint this shitty little text up here so to do that select a hand grip and go to the first hand grip material add a new image texture node generate a new image we're going to name that handgrip diffuse set the resolution to whatever you want I'm going to go 2048 but you can go less than that generated type should be blank and then click okay select this node go over to the render properties and switch the render engine to Cycles then find the bake menu down here set the bake type to diffuse and make sure you uncheck direct and indirect now load up this hand grip diffuse image which we just generated in this node currently it's a black image but once we select this we select the node and click bake and after a few minutes you're going to get your baked texture right here the reason that we did this is so that we now have a unique texture for this hand grip it's no longer just a wood image that we downloaded cuz we're going to have to use that wood texture for something else right so now we have a specific hand grip diffuse texture we're going to replace the old texture with this new texture by plugging that into the base color and now in the texture painting workspace we're going to be able to paint over this sometimes blender is not going to let you paint [ __ ] in 3D space it seems like there's a problem the reason for this is that your normals are converted so to fix that go to edit mode shift n to recalculate the normals now you can go back to texture paint and you can paint whatever you want so giveing my reference image right here I'm going to go to side view and I need a smaller brush for this so I'm going to go with something like 16 and I'm also going to adjust the fall off so it's not so smooth now I can use this little brush to create whatever this says over here I'm going to zoom in over here and we're going to start writing out the letters it says a m 6072 we're going to give this a little underline and this makes our hand grip ready to go what do you think how many people were killed by the AK-47 in all time in the next episode we're going to model the receiver so the upper part the middle part of this gun drop your questions in the comment section below make sure to check out my ebook because everything that I ever use for modeling and blender is in that [ __ ] ebook and I'm also going to continue to add more stuff to that ebook over time also check out my patreon page you can find some more modeling courses in there and I'm going to see you guys in the next [Music] part [Music]

Channel: Aryan

Views: 21,222

Keywords: Blender, ak47, ak-47, ak 47, tutorial, modeling, 3d, gun, weapon, game, asset, development

Id: ULcC3uh8sbc

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 27 2023