Creating a realistic scope with grooves.

[system]

Hello everyone! I’ve used mostly Maya in my modeling journey and recently started learning Zbrush. The professional game asset creators always have some really nice true to life guns with scopes that have the grooves, words, and numbers all so clearly printed on the model.

This doesn’t seem to work for me by simply using the Spotlight and projecting textures from real life photographs.

http://i1086.photobucket.com/albums/j443/Latitudeblu/scope2_zpsb2bc8031.jpg

As you can see my texturing is laughably bad.

How do I do it like the pros so I can start freelancing and stuff.

Might just sign up for another month of Digital tutorials. They get picked on a lot for not being as good as Gnomen but do have some useful videos on there.

[system]

Hello everyone! I’ve used mostly Maya in my modeling journey and recently started learning Zbrush. The professional game asset creators always have some really nice true to life guns with scopes that have the grooves, words, and numbers all so clearly printed on the model. This doesn’t seem to work for me by simply using the Spotlight and projecting textures from real life photographs.http://i1086.photobucket.com/albums/j443/Latitudeblu/scope2_zpsb2bc8031.jpgAs you can see my texturing is laughably bad. How do I do it like the pros so I can start freelancing and stuff.Might just sign up for another month of Digital tutorials. They get picked on a lot for not being as good as Gnomen but do have some useful videos on there.

The problem with texturing for a game is that you have to limit your polygon count. With spotlight, you’re painting every polygon available, as opposed to projecting a high resolution UV texture onto a low resolution mesh for games.In order to accomplish this you’re going to want to take your base mesh of the scope down to its lowest subdivision level so you can create a UV map. UVs are a lot easier to deal with if you have a low poly-count. Now, depending on the topology of your scope, the UV map you’ve made might look absolutely ridiculous when flattened out. In this case you want to find the seams where the UV reconnects to the mesh and polypaint guides onto the neighboring polygons, so you get a nice idea of how your UV map wraps around the mesh. From there you can export the UV to photoshop. That’s how I project high resolution UVs to a mesh. I’m sure the zBrush masters know how to do all of this without leaving zBrush, but Photoshop works just as well. You should look up “ZBrush Professional Tips and Techniques - By Rick Baker” on Amazon as I believe he does a very good job explaining the UV mapping process for low poly models as well as techniques for hard-surface modeling, which in your case is an important subject when it comes to gaming. I hope you find this post helpful