The latest gun model for NextGen Reality is the classic M1 Garand. One of the most famous guns of WWII. I had done a low poly version of this one a while back that never got used so I started with that model and then built on to it from there.

Had all kinds of trouble with the normals on this though. Took me more then a week to find away around the issue. Never did figure out what the problem was but just had to find a work around.

Basically the normals were all flipped in odd ways. Each one had one color channel that was displaying wrong. Normally you can fix this easily by flipping the offending color channel in Photoshop, but for some reason that had no effect on the model. I would flip the channel in PS and then it should update the new normals in max but no change could ever be seen. If I flipped the normals in max they would work fine but I need it so I don't have to flip them in the shader. It was a big mess that doesn't make any sense.

Needless to say I had to convert the normal map to a bump map since nothing I tried would get the normals to display right. The bump map worked pretty goof though. Almost can't tell its just a bump, although I did blow them way out in these renders. The final result won't be nearly as bumpy.

The Sharps 1874 45/50 cal rifle. This rifle is largely considered the gun that won the west. It was one first high powered long distance rifles, and some consider it the first sniper rifle even though it was mainly used to kill buffalo at long range.

This was a pretty fun model to do and not very hard either. As far as guns go, the general shapes on this one are a lot easier.

Remodeling and Baby room

This isn't really 3d related but I had to share anyway since it has been consuming my life for the last few weeks. Had my basement finally concreted out so I could make my studio and also painted a big bright mural for my, yet unborn, little girl.

The basement has been a very big project and I have been working on it for several years now and it is great to see it finally come to fruition. It all started when we bought this historic townhouse, which had a closed off room in the basement that was filled about 30 yards of dirt.

When I started the dirt was to the ceiling and only a small area at the front of the room was accessible. The bench seen in the first few images was the only thing in the room and the dirt was pile in around it so that it was about 3/4 buried.

I started digging dirt out one 5 gal bucket at a time. I piled all the dirt in my backyard which I then used as a base for my brick patio. The dirt was super dry and I had to wear a respirator mask to work in it at time. Over the course of 6 months or so I dug out about 15 yards of dirt . I had left enough dirt in place to hold the very old foundation in place.

During the process of digging out the room I found all kinds of interesting pieces buried in the dirt from the construction of the house. I found almost 40 different glass bottles. Every one was a different shape and size, not a one of them was identical to another. I found 3-4 different sized wine jugs. All but one in almost perfect condition. There were also countless other liquor, medicine and paint bottles. Most in perfect shape, just a bit dirty, plus a endless amount of random construction debris.

After having dug out the room to where it is in the first image, The room sat closed off for a longtime until I figured out what to do with it next. After a year or to we decided that we wanted to put in concrete and make a studio/ office out of it. So I hired in some guys to come and do it.

Over the course of a week they excavated out the rest of the room, laid in the foundation support and then laid in the floor. The excavation part was the hardest on everyone involved, since they had to bring in jack hammer and hammer drills to break up the floor enough to lay in a new floor. In the end they also took out another 15 yards of dirt, much to everyones surprise. We had only estimated it was another 5-6 yards.

Once they had laid the concrete, the wife and I began cleaning every nook and cranny in the basement. The dust of the dirt went everywhere and had to bee scrubbed off everything, including the rafters, walls, pipes, air duct and floors. I don't think we will ever get 100% of it out here, but we got enough of it to finally move all the rooms around.

Which leads me to the baby room. We had to finish the basement stuff so we could move the rooms around and free up the middle bedroom to become the nursery. Baby name is going to be Subaru Mary and Subaru in Japanese is the stars and is also the constellation name for the Pleiades or seven sisters. So naturally I did a stars and moon motif to suit her name.

Whole painting took me about two full days to do it. A few hours to concept and draw some sketches of the characters, about 13 hours to paint all the base colors in and about 4 hours to paint the outline.

PPSH 41

PPSH 41. The Russian equivalent of a tommy gun. Although American tommy guns date from the 20's, the Russians used this gun mainly through WWII and beyond. 9707 triangles with 204x294 Normals, diffuse and specular maps. Took a little less then 30 hours to complete. This was also one of my first attempts at using cavity maps, which I employed to help get faster highlights.

Mosin Nagant

Mosin Nagant Dragoon. Soviet military issue. 9445 triangles. Diffuse, normal and specular maps at 2048x2048. Took about 30 hours to complete the model. Still working to get better results out my normals but getting better at the process.

Model of an AK-74 assault rifle. 9667 triangles, 204 diffuse, specular and normal map. Took 4.5 days to complete.

Nextgen m1911 .45 cal pistol

This gun was done for a client test, to see if they liked my work. Fortunately they did, so there will likely be more weapons like it to come.

This gun is a classic model of the M1911 .45 cal pistol. It has been standard issue in the military since WWI and still in service today. I was able to obtain technical schematics of the weapon parts and as a result the model is perfect scale to the real thing and has all the working parts, well the ones that will be visible in game anyway.

The model itself is 4660 polys and has a 1024x1024 diffuse, specular and normal map.

Net Devil's Jumpgate

Here is a recent addition I did for the Net Devil game Jumpgate. This is the first and biggest art update to the game in many years and there is lots more to come.

For the planet its very simple geometry, just two spheres and circular plane. 3 1024x1024 diffuse and opacity maps. Took some time to get it into he game though, since this was the first really new model anyone had tried to put in the game in years. The main problems were getting the mesh(s) to orient correctly around the axis, and for some reason we couldn't get the ring texture to show up. After making up some work arounds we were able to get it in to the game and patched to the live servers.