Games Production - The Construction and the Mapping of the First Person Gun

As I was one of the two environment artists, I was tasked with creating the gun and the props for the game. Rastislav Smolen is our prop concept artist. This meant that I would be working with him extremely closely, getting concepts off of him and altering them when need be.

The first task that was set to the both of us, was to create the gun that would present in the game, this would always be in the players view, so it had to have an interesting shape to it. Rastislav originally had come up with a fair few concepts, this included a shotgun and another variety for the machine gun. We decided that we would also have to look at the environment art that Razvan Prajanu had constructed to make sure that the gun would fit in to the environment.

Rastislav's Concept to follow. 

This is the concept that Rastislav had for the final gun. I was really happy with the plan he had given me, it was clear enough to follow, it also meant that the base would remain pretty much the same. There were some adjustments that needed to be made on the gun, not only to add detail, but to make sure the gun worked.

The gun has been spilt into sections, this makes it easy for me to U.V map it when it comes to it. Firstly you have the main base of the gun, this includes the grip and the handles. The changes that have been made here are that the grip has further detailing on it, with the addition of holes so that the steam can escape. On the other side of the gun, we all felt that a pin needed to be added, for animation purposes and for the gun to seem more realistic, so on the body of the gun, a gap for the pin needed to be included. Above the main body is the sight, where I have added the ridges past the scope. This again, was to give the gun a more unique feel, with it still fitting in with the environment. To the back of the main body is the Stock of the gun. There is not much change to this part of the concept, except with the addition of the soft back for the shoulder to add comfort to the gun. The Barrel at the front of the gun originally had grating in it. It would follow the concept that Rastislav had put up, but as we where limited on the tri count, so as a team, we decided that it would be best to remove this part and add a a straight barrel.

12889 Tri's for the base of Gun.

The final Tri count for the main part of the gun was 12889. This was a decent amount, as we had divided the tri's between the 3D artists and this was no way near the total that we were expecting it to be. This was due to me retopologizing the model and adding triangles into the sections that weren't going to be animated. At first, I was unsure on this process, but then my tutor reassured me that doing it will contributed towards our project.

The Addition of the Pin.

As I had divided the parts of the gun into different sections, U.V mapping the gun wasn't too hard to do. The reason why the gun needed to be mapped is so that when we apply a texture to it, it will not look blurry and will fit in well. This wasnt an extremely long process, but out of all the parts of the gun, the main body was defiantly the longest. I wanted to make sure that on the gun, the seams didn't appear on the left side. This was the side that was in constant view of the player and the seams would drastically affect how the players see the game.

The Gun Base Mapped.

One of the things that needed to be created separately was the magazine of the gun. This was because the magazine is going to be animated in the game. The magazine will be taken out by the character when they reload and a new one will be placed in the gun. As this was a fairly small aspect of the game, the magazine tri count had to low. It was also retopologized, with a few triangles added to the magazine for it to keep its shape. If I were to do this again, I would make this just a plain cube and use the normals, this will drastically reduce the polys, but as we have plenty to spare due to the low poly gun, then for the moment, this is OK.

246 Tri's for the Magazine.

As this was an extremely small asset, it was very easy to map. All I needed to do was cut it along the bottom and split the 4 section of the square. Then using the unfold tool, I could brush the U.V's and have them looking perfect. Again, this was an easy process and meant that it was now ready to send to Quixel to attach a texture to it.

The Magazine Mapped.

The last section of the gun was the pin, this was two separate meshes that were combined. The first mesh was the leaver of the pin, this was created using a torus and then stretching it along. I then got a flat cube and combined the two. The stretched cube will retract every time the gun has been fired. This will then be pulled back by the characters arms when reloading the gun. This was a later addition to the gun, as this wasnt present in the concept. Our team had decided that a pin would be required, so I constructed it and try to make it as low poly as possible. 

The pin of the gun is 676 tri's in total. This is mainly from the leaver. There is a reason for this, as when the character reloads the gun, This is the first thing that you see. Though it still is a vast amount wasted on such a small object. If I were to do this next time, I would defiantly reduce the amount, using the maps to help me here.

676 Tri's for the Pin.

The again, was extremely simple to map, as sit was two separate meshes and required very little effort in figuring out where to cut the U.V's. Once everything had been mapped, I selected all the meshes and then went into the U.V editor. Here I selected the button "Layout". This meant that all the meshes U.V's I had selected fit in coordination with each other. This has saved us texture maps, as we can texture multiple assets, with this method of texturing. Once I had all the Meshes selected and laid out, I took a U.V snapshot of the U.V map. This was created so that I could make a colour ID map. By creating a colour ID map, Quixel will recognise what part of the map needs texturing.      

The Pin Mapped. 

Below is the U.V snapshot that I created. By putting it into Photoshop, I can manually add what texture I want to go where. As you can see, the U.V snapshot gives us an outline of where the lines of the mesh. This is fantastic if you are going through the manual process that I am going through. It means that I can choose exactly where the texture is going to start and end.

U.V snapshot ready to colour for Quixel.

The picture below is the manual Colour map that I had constructed using the U.V snapshot from Maya and Photoshop. I have had to use a variety of colours so that when it comes to putting the gun into Quixel, there are many textures that will feature on the gun. The core part of the gun is a dark blue. Once this is Quixel, The Blue will be identified and a dark, perhaps black gun metal will be attached to it.

The Colour ID Map ready for Quixel.

I decided that I wanted to get some interesting renders for the gun. This was for two of our concept artists. One was for the character artist, Steve Welch, who wanted to create images of the players character and a comic book to come along with the game. I gave him one of my renders, in which he used as template and painted over the top. I was also asked for a render of the gun by Razvan, who was constructing the HUD for our game. The idea was that the gun was going to appear in the bottom corner next to the ammo count. He wanted to make it fairly transparent, so it doesn't distract the player, but makes them away of what the gun looks like from the front.

The Final Gun (Barrel later removed to save poly's).

The Final Gun.

Render from Behind.

Render from in front.

Where the Gun will be Positioned in Game.

Gun with Detachable Magazine for animation.

The object was now ready to be extracted and placed into Quixel. Everything had also been mapped, so now it was time to take the mesh with us. To do this and making sure it was easy to handle in Unity, the game engine that we were using, I had to centre the mesh. I had to select the option "Absolute Transform" and centre the pivot. In the boxes next to the absolute transform, that are labelled X, Y and Z, I entered 0,0 and 0. This took the mesh back to the centre of the scene. I then extracted the models, with the magazine and pin (not combined) as an OBJ. By centring the mesh, It makes it easier for George Burchmore, our Game Designer, to control the model in Unity.