Modeling Monday #3 | 7.27.14 | Sten Gun Mk. II

A quick depth-of-field render to see what a possible in-game iron sights scenario would look like.

Yeah, I'm aware it's not Monday. And depending on how you look at it, I'm six days late, or one day early! I think I attempted something a little too complex for a single day's worth of work, at least, I'm not fast enough yet. Also, I had family emergencies to deal with this week, and family comes first, as much as I did want hammer away at this model. 

All that aside, this is my first weapon model. I think I pushed the tris too high, the 'lowpoly' version is around 17k tris (the two springs pushed this number up by 4k alone lol). I could soften the normals on it and that would help smooth it out. This is the smoothed version. So yeah, this took me a week to do, I'm not ashamed, I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot of new techniques, like how to make curves with triangles and how to make springs. I did make a major mistake though, in that I didn't model the middle fat piece of the barrel as a separate object. Which led to some inaccuracies where the shells get ejected and basically rendered it a nonworking model. However, the bolt slides back like it should, the magazine slides in and out, and the tigger rotates like it should! All in all, it was a ton of good practice for building an object out of a lot of smaller components, and I think the finished result looks decent. I might try to throw this into Unreal Engine and mess around with it in there. I don't know if I'll UV it and texture it yet, that would probably take about the same amount of time as modeling it. We'll see. I still plan on modeling something tomorrow, for Modeling Monday #4. It might be a little less ambitious haha.

Here are some quick work-in-progress renders where you can see how I started to build up the model:

And the final result.

I also updated my blog look. I got tired of the shadows and borders around the images, and you can only get rid of that in 'simple' mode. So I switched to a more traditional blog look. The color scheme fits me pretty well. Hope you enjoy the new look!