LogInIvan Gusev showed us how he turned the wood gun from his childhood into a 3D model with ZBrush and Substance 3D Painter and demonstrated how little details told its story.
Introduction
My name is Ivan, I am a 25-year-old self-taught artist from Russia. I started working in 3D modeling in early 2020. At that time, I was a student at a technical college; I was good at making blueprints by hand and modeling in CAD programs. All of this was required for the profession I was studying for. At that point, I decided to develop my modeling skills and combine them with video games. From an early age, I loved playing video games, especially the various weapons that could be seen in different shooters, and from that moment on, I had a dream to work in the gaming industry, which I fulfilled by becoming a 3D weapon artist. I chose the weapon/hard surface direction as this is the most interesting for me.
When I started learning 3D modeling on my own, I used whatever resources were available at that time to learn. I didn't have any acquaintances, friends, or mentors who could teach me everything in 3D, so I learned everything myself and found my path quite difficult and thorny. There were many difficulties in learning 3D, but I did not give up and continued to learn, even if I could not succeed. I want to say a special thank you to my parents and loved ones for their constant support in my endeavors.
After 1-1,5 years of training and creating an interesting portfolio, at the end of 2021, I got a job at GFA Games as a middle 3D weapon artist and started working on my first game project, PIONER. To this day, I continue to contribute to this wonderful project.
WOODGUN
The idea came to me back in June 2024 when I decided to make a unique and conceptual project for my portfolio. I knew in advance and understood that there was probably no similar work anywhere on the internet since the main references were only in my childhood memories.
Back then, I loved playing shooting games with my friends, and to have something to shoot with, I made my own weapons from wooden boards, nails, electrical tape, and colored bottle caps (the most memorable detail). I had a whole arsenal of wood guns, and I did not forget my favorite, and now, having enough skills, I decided to recreate it from my memory.
Modeling
Initially, I thought that it would be difficult for me to do this work since I specialize more in hard surfaces (plastic/metal), and I don't really know how to work with wood, and sculpture is not my strong point. So I decided to combine different modeling approaches and speed up the work.
The main software for modeling I use is Blender, a great program with a huge database of various addons for hard surface modeling.
I started by blocking out the model, taking the standard forms of the machine gun and approximate dimensions and throwing unique details on the weapon. Knowing perfectly well that I couldn't make such complex and detailed boards manually, I used photorealistic scans of boards found in open sources as a basis for the model. They were of different sizes, and I adjusted them to fit the blocking and used them to make booleans to get different textures on the slices.
Next, I added various details to the model, such as bottle caps, a lot of nails that are used to fasten all the boards together, wrapped a little electrical tape, and added an old backpack strap so that you can conveniently carry weapons. After fully creating the concept, I started working in ZBrush.
In ZBrush, I manually modified the places of cuts and added various chips and bruises to the tree using special brushes. I was refining my concept and bringing it to its current final state.
When I started creating low poly, I realized that geometry on high poly is very complex, and manually doing retopology would be unbearably difficult and long, although I did this work for several hours a week since I work at my main job and do not have so much free time to devote so much effort to the technical stages of personal projects.
So with low poly, I made things as easy as possible by just cleaning the high poly grid a lot with a decimation master in ZBrush. This saved me a lot of work time and, at the same time, saved small details on the model, as well as various protrusions and cracks that I would have modeled manually for a very long time. Since the model itself was designed exclusively for beautiful renderings and my personal PC is able to pull a large load, I did not limit myself to the quality of the low poly, the quantity and quality of materials since I do not make a game-ready model, but a beautiful art, and I did not see the point in setting myself restrictions in the technical stages.
With low poly, I had to work a little, there were a lot of problem areas that I had to manually edit, but it didn't take much of my time, and I soon started UV-unwrapping. I still continued to work in Blender, unwrapping and packing the model in the same place. Unwrapping was not so easy, as the geometry grid was quite dense, and I had to work a lot manually to select the correct magnifier that could be used to make the cut.
After the unwrapping was completed, I packed the model with six 4K-quality materials. I split them based on the maximum fullness of the UV space and the same texel on all materials in order to maximize the use of the texture on the model. Also, I didn't skimp on materials, as I didn't see the point in significantly reducing the quality of the model.
To bake the entire model, I used Marmoset Toolbag. First, you need to divide the groups ‘low_’ for low poly and ‘high_’ for high poly into bake groups and assign materials, then we load the model via Quick Loader and set the Multiple Texture Sets function to bake at once all six materials and get a nice ambient occlusion between them. With this feature, the bake process was very smooth and incredibly fast. I baked all the necessary maps, such as Normal (Flip Y if you work in DirectX in Substance 3D Painter), World Space Normal, Color ID, Curvature, AO, Position, and Thickness (my baking settings are listed below.)
Texturing
To begin with, here is a small configuration in Substance 3D Painter before starting texturing. Next, I'll show my settings (this is basically such a convenient standard).
Creating textures was a fairly simple and short-lived process. For texturing, I used Substance 3D Painter. For the texture base, I used various wood and board materials to give maximum realism, and later, I worked with them and refined them. I already added color variations of wood, stickers on top, drew a lot by hand, imitating drawings with a felt-tip pen on wood since, in my childhood, markers and pencils were affordable tools to somehow diversify my wooden weapons.
Then I filled everything with dust and dirt and finally applied contrast and Sharpen to the model to give it maximum clarity and detail. I made textures in parallel with rendering, constantly moving from program to program, correcting and refining something. But I will certainly show you the step-by-step process of working with texture layers.
When I prepared the basic wood material, I thought a little about what to do next and began to try and select options. At first, I put some old stickers on the model, but it seemed very little. I started experimenting and imagining what I could do with it as a teenager. I came up with the idea to draw various elements of real weapon parts on the gun, so I made a brightly painted sight, painted cartridges on the magazine, and all the other details that we could see in my project.
Rendering
To create the render, I used Marmoset Toolbag. In it, I've already started putting together small scenes to show a little bit of my model's history. The first scene is something like a yard next to the house, we see a bench, an old wall, some garbage, and a bit of overgrown grass, so I wanted to show an old yard where someone's childhood could have passed.
The next scene that came to mind was a small workshop where this weapon could be crafted in real life, and it fits perfectly.
I set up a table, put a vise on it, and scattered various boards and tools on the table that could be used to create a wood gun.
I've already experimented with all the other renderers as much as possible, trying to do something unusual and interesting so that all the renderers somehow differ from each other.
With the scene and camera settings, everything is also quite experimental. I selected the camera settings individually for each scene. I wanted to emphasize the individuality of the render. Also, all renders are made exclusively in Marmoset; I did not do any additional processing in Photoshop or similar programs.
With light sources, it was quite simple. Basically, my model was illuminated from the operation of the HDRI map since the main scenes were calculated for this, and in some places, of course, I added light sources to, perhaps, slightly highlight the model in dark places or emphasize the contour.
On renderers where the HDRI card was not used, I already worked closely with lighting sources, placed lamps to emphasize the contour of the model, and then highlighted all the necessary places and achieved beautiful renderings.
Conclusion
I would call the main elements of creating beautiful art: you need an interesting idea that will appeal to the viewer, something unusual and unique, or if you have a model that has already been created in the real world, then create an interesting story on the model so that the one who will look at your art will be interested in considering it and learn various details on your project. To make it clear that this model has lived its life, add traces of use on it, such as (in my case) damaged wood, electrical tape, dust and dirt, something left by hand, the same drawings with a felt-tip pen, or you can attach something interesting to the model so that the eye clings to this detail.
I did this project based only on my memory from childhood and on my conceptual experience in creating such works. For me, the main difficulty was creating the concept itself since there was no specific model, and I had to remember a lot and think about how I could create an interesting conceptual project and at the same time not move much away from the source of my memories. All the technical stages, such as LP/UV/bake, did not bother me much, as I wanted to invest as much as possible in the conceptual part of the model.
From this project, I gained more experience in creating the concept and beautiful renders, as this was the most attractive part of the work for me.
In conclusion, I would like to wish all aspiring 3D artists patience, perseverance, and a great desire to create projects, as this work is quite difficult, and everything turns out not the first time.
Do what you like, this is the most important thing!