Wingstone magnum 45 revolver

[DarK ZanatoS]

Hello there;
Over this easter i had plenty of free time to play around with zbrush and between one of my doodles i decided to do this magnum 45 at my own style though to play around more with customized alphas in zbrush and aswell try the potential of normal maps.

I did the base mesh in maya (m45, cage of bullets ,sherif star and bullets), scratches -alphas-normal maps in zbrush,render mental ray and color correction in photoshop. Im not quite happy with it yet, tell me oh masters of the universe! how can i fix the scene more?

WM45-dkzs.jpg (http://javascript%3Cb%3E%3C/b%3E:zb_insimg%28%2731488%27,%27WM45-dkzs.jpg%27,1,0%29)

WM452-dkzs.jpg (http://javascript%3Cb%3E%3C/b%3E:zb_insimg%28%2731489%27,%27WM452-dkzs.jpg%27,1,0%29)

[Sebcesoir]

I like it, cool rendering of the gun...
Looks like a like a plastic toy...

[DarK ZanatoS]

yeh i think thats my problem, i dont know why the normal map makes it look like a toy gun made of shine plastic :(

[Wildsketch]

I'm not sure about what could be wrong with it either. Frankly I think it looks good and I didn't think it looked plastic. Not the gun at least, there seems to be considerably less surface detail on the sherrif's star.

I learned most of what I know about doing a metal shader from the tutorials on Neil Blevins' website. The more metallic an object is the less you are able to see its diffuse color and the more its overall appearance is defined by its reflection. The color of the metal comes from a tint in the reflection. The reflectivity is uniform across a metal surface in contrast to plastic, water and other reflective materials which have much stronger reflections at the edges.

Since reflection is everything to the look of metal your environment or reflection map will have a strong influence on the object's realism. Often the dull look of worn or scratched metal can be achieved by simply blurring the reflection map. Hilights should not come from a specular component but from the reflection map. This is one reason why HDRI (High-Dynamic Range Images) are so helpful. They record a much higher range of brightness than most image file types and allow the hilights to be much brighter than other areas of the reflected environment. You can fake this in some programs by adjusting the output of an ordinary reflection map.

A noise component or mottled bitmap in the reflection strength channel can also add an appearance of surface grime. If you are going in that direction you may want to use a map that darkens the inside of grooves, scratches and other design features too.

I hope I've said something that helps. Your picture looks really good to me.

[panstar]

The composition and Modeling 5*, I agree the metal needs working on, and need to be dulled down scratched up. Or if you had it resting in a gun box of sort. then you could have it as shiny because it shows that it's cared for and therfore regulary polished. Also the sherifs badge, I can't put my finger on whats wrong, again I think the metal needs to be tarnished. How about adding some jail keys to the invetory.

Keep going as this is looking really cool. and original to other art thats being posted.

[DarK ZanatoS]

Oh thank you very much for ur comments, i will follow them and look at some tutorials of those. I did indeed used an hdri image based lightining but seems if i put the emit light on it gets really bright and cant see whats on there. Anyway, thank you again and hopefully soon ill be posting more updates :)

[Wildsketch]

I only know about HDRIs in theory. I have downloaded a few but have been unable to discover how to sucessfully use them because I can't figure out how to use environment mapping with a circle or a cross. Though I understand that part of using them is setting the range of the HDRI that corresponds to normal light. Maybe you are setting your program to use a part of the picture with washed out light, or more light than you need.