Designing a Double Barrel Shotgun

Introduction

Hello, my name is Musaab Alazawi, I’m from Ankara, Turkey, and I’m 27 years old. I’m an engineer of computer tech and a self-taught 3D artist

I work in the AAA game industry now and of course, doing some personal projects in my spare time. I started learning 3D and game art about three years ago and I think that was a very good decision.

Double Barrel Shotgun

I was looking at the references and thought I could make my own double barrel but with a bold and aggressive look. I started to visualize some ornament designs with skulls and creepy stuff to add the feeling of a deadly weapon that would look like it had been a part of a war.

Modeling

There are no secrets about my workflow – it’s just usual modeling in Blender, a blockout following existing blueprints, then smoothing things up like beveling edges, subdividing rounded shapes and sometimes sculpting to get the right shape. Then I start to make a lowpoly for it.

Texturing

I used Substance Painter to texture the guns. I did the ornament design inside Substance Painter using the amazing brushes by Jonas Ronnegard. I designed the overall look by rotating, scaling and placing brush by brush. It’s a bit crazy to do that as it took me about 4 hours to finish the ornament but in the end, it turned out great. Of course, you can bring some ready ornament designs but I just wanted to do my own stuff.

There’s also nothing too fancy about the metal material. I just used existing smart materials in Substance Painter and played with the settings. I also used ready masks for the edges and scratches, and a fill layer + customized mask for the dirt.

The more time you spend on the texturing process or adding more details to your highpoly (wisely) the better the model will look.

Lighting

For lighting and rendering, I used Marmoset Toolbag. As you can see, I added 11 lights, though I don’t do this often. Usually, I add just 3 or 4 lights. For this asset, however, it worked pretty well. It’s also good sometimes to change the lighting for each angle (not just rotating).

Presentation

For the presentation, I used Photoshop to add some dust and sparks (I found some good textures online for free). You can also create this from scratch using a particle system.

It’s always good to compare the final result to the works of other great artists and keep adjusting until you get the right look.

Musaab Alazawi, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev