Hi all, I didn’t post any work here, so I think it’s time to show something.
I am a moderator of the Zbrush french community and the main translater of the documentation in french.
I am a spectator here, but I wanted to share with you what I did.
Very cool. Looks like the gun to me (but I’m not much of an expert).
Looks good to me too. 
Any chance you can give us an insight into your techniques?
You can see the original gun here
[attach=63656]1858lemailmc4.jpg[/attach]
[attach=63657]1858remailmm0.jpg[/attach]
And for my technique, I used some primary shape that I made in silo to stamp it in Zbrush.
I create the negative shape to dig in the model.
It’s fairly simple, I create those shape for the groove on the rear of the gun.
And for the wood on the handle I created a primary shape, and cut it in PM with primitive.
The cutting on the bottom left (or right depending on the side) corner are made with a Sphere with Zsub activated, with PM, and that’s the same thing for the long cutting on the bottom of this shape, you can see that its like a big sphere has cut this piece of wood, so I did it with PM.
Very good likeness. My only crit would be that area that the shell gets ejected from the slide needs to be undercut just a bit. Right now it looks like the barrel and the slide are one piece. An easy fix for an outstanding model. Would love to see a wireframe and then how you texture it.
Excellent work, I really like this hard surface stuff coming through… 
I would guess this technique involves, the Flatten brush, Pinch & Lazy mouse???
Very good man
Could you show your base model?
I’m working a video dvd covering mechanical and precision scultping in zbrush where I will go deepper in details, so you can get few more tips.
But you already have a good base!
Thx everybody.
I can show you the basemesh but I don’t think it will be really helpful.
Here is the base for the top of the gun.
[attach=63658]basemeshkt9.jpg[/attach]
That’s a pretty darn good job. I always struggle to do anything non-organic in Z.
That’s a very good model as well. I use to own a replica colt 1911 except it was made by Smith and Wesson I think.
Hey, Praying mantis, thx for posting yourbase mesh just a tip:
in my mechanical objects, I try to make unifroms quads on the whole base mesh.
This way you wont have any risks to lack details on some areas.
I will try to post my zniper base mesh if you dont mind.
Looking good, and its always great to see hard surface stuff in zbrush. I’d second that even quads make life a heck of a lot easier. 
Wayne…
You can do it Seb.
And for my topology, I choose to concentrate some edge on the area where I need the most, that’s why I put more edge on the rear, to get enough edge for the grooves.
And I also used the local subdivision feature (wonderful feature :D) for the engraving text.
And I have done a retopology for the area where the bullets are ejected.
I think I have almost use all the features I can get with Zbrush 3 
I am pretty happy with the workflow I ended, I can probably improve it, but at least I think I can do any mechanical part with Zbrush.
Very good.
I was doing the same thing last night, trying to re-discover the techniques that Ralf Stumpf, Seb, and some other very precise sculpters use for mech and exoskeleton effects. From observing them and asking questions, I’ve discovered that there is no super-secret simple technique, nor is there an absolute requirement for massive polygon counts. It all comes down to mastering all the techniques available and using them where suitable in the construction of your design.
I was working on a simple polysphere divided to only 1.5 million polys and adding things like complex seams, bolt-patterns, speaker grille, and other designs. No subtools or custom bases produced in external software. (Obviously, subtools and custom bases are key to more advanced designs! I was just seeing what was possible with a single tool.)
The one problem I run into at only 1.5 million polys is something I call poly-aliasing, which is the ZBrush equivalent of pixel-aliasing. My current tool looks fantastic (Stumpf-quality) on a 1024 pixel document after it as been reduced by half and anti-aliased. It still looks pretty good after doubling the document size and doing AAHalf on that, resulting in a final of about 1024 pixels square, but you can make out some ‘poly-aliasing’. Any larger, and the poly-aliasing is just too apparent. Obviously, dividing to 6 million polys will allow a much larger final image that is still free of discernable poly-aliasing.
I’ll post the tool and discuss techniques in another thread once I’ve gotten farther along in my experiments.
Here’s the base mesh I used. I prefer to have clean geometry instead of local subdividing, if I would have to do a realtime version:
The rifle is so detailed it’s just crazy! you’re one of the best organic and non organic modeler I know!
The gun is also great! 
Great seb, and when you smooth it, it make the slope on the handle, (the rounded curve around the trigger and on the handle.
Especially I prefer to doesn’t keep any attention of the topology first and then use the retopology tools, they are wonderful and make the work easier.
And for the details, I didn’t make my gun to blow any face That was just to see if I can do the same.
That’s sure my gun is ridiculous comparing to Seb’s rifle, even If I got this gun in real life and I see Seb coming with his big rilfe I will run like a chicken
