Part One of my 3D Animation Capstone Final was to chose an Area of Refinement. My area of Refinement was 3D Modeling. Although I’m not a fan of guns in real life, I do love first person shooter games. And in most of them the only part of your character you can really see is your weapon. I absolutely loved creating this assault rifle. I used Mark Masters tutorial on Pluralsight to begin my rifle. The tutorial was easy to follow and extremely detail oriented but still allowed to creativity and to make changes. It utilized so many different things that we’ve covered over the past three semesters. Using primarily planes and cubes I created all the main geometry and cylinders for many of the finer details. I used many modifiers that we’ve used before like SubSurf, Array, Mirror, and Boolean as well as new techniques such as Edge Split. As far as material and texturing I used Cycles and the Compositing Workspace to create the finished product. Using the Mix Shader to start, I fine-tuned the color and glossiness using Nodes. The rifle in total probably took me between 15 and 20 hours not including render time.
I’ve included both the lower poly version of the rifle which was the final product before smoothing and adding materials as well as the finished, high resolution rifle.
My area of research was Photorealism. I’ve realized through creating this scene that Photorealism isn’t my specialty. Although I usually don’t mind the attention to detail I found that Photorealism involves the things that I’m as not great at which include lighting and texturing. That being said I think it’s a really valuable skill to have some grasp of. I used the Donut tutorial by Andrew Price on his BlenderGuru Youtube channel. Considering this is my first time really trying my hand at Photorealism it turned out pretty well and I’m pleased with the results.
Jenna Johnson 