Crafting a Unique Aged Carved Gunstock With ZBrush & Substance 3D

Introduction

Hello, my name is Anastasia Prokopovich, but on ArtStation I am better known as Anestyan. I am a 3D Weapon/Hard-Surface Artist currently working at the game studio EVEGOPLAYON.

I drew a lot from an early age and knew that my future career would definitely involve something creative. After high school, I went to college, where I studied graphic design and art teaching. I was absolutely in love with what I was doing and I was sure that design was my calling.

The main aim of my last year at college was to complete a project called the Artist's Exhibition. The brief involved creating an interior design and infographics to accompany the exhibition. We were given the choice of two main ways to complete this project, either using 3D modeling software or the old-fashioned method of drawing by hand. I was completely unfamiliar with a concept like 3D, but it's important to mention that I always like to try new things, and this time was no exception. Also, after a bit of thinking, I decided that it would be much easier for me to work with perspective using 3D software, and I would not have to redraw the same room dozens of times. My point of view seemed fair to many of my friends who knew no more about modeling and 3D than I did.

I decided to start my journey into 3D with the most popular 3D modeling package at the time – Cinema 4D. And it was amazing. At one point, while I was working on it, I was incredibly upset that I had never even tried to find out what 3D was when I was at college! There's so much more I could have done! But it's okay, it's never too late to start, I thought, and began to explore the new and completely unknown world of 3D graphics even more actively and thoughtfully.

All my efforts were not in vain. I passed my project with an "Excellent" and, most importantly, I have never regretted my decision to use 3D. I started thinking more and more about how cool it would be to work on such projects every day, for example, at a 3D studio. But at the time, it was an unrealistic and distant dream. After graduating from college, I worked as a graphic designer for quite a long time but quickly became disappointed with the profession, and the feeling as if something in my life was missing only became stronger and stronger. Then I decided on a change of career: to forget design as a horrible dream and dive into the world of 3D.

By saving up money, I was able to pay for a 3D graphics course at XYZ School, and now every day of my life involves many hours of learning about modeling and its application in the games industry. Through the school, I met a lot of like-minded people. Some of them became my friends. I never finished the course but continued to study on my own. After a few grueling months of self-teaching, I got my first job in games and was finally able to quit my previous job!

Did I have any regrets? Absolutely not! At the moment I am a specialist with a year and a half of experience and a lot of cases under my belt! I am very grateful for my willpower, my friends, and the basic skills I learned at college.

During my career, I've participated in the creation of AAA and AA level games, the names of which I'm afraid I can't reveal yet, but at the moment, for example, I'm working on a mobile game in the shooter genre called World War Heroes (WWH).

Legendary Stock Remington 11

I wanted to try something completely new, to do something I hadn't done before, and also to test my sculpting skills. On Pinterest, I came across the work of Evgeni Dimov, a representative of the Bulgarian school of fine carving and engraving, and I wanted to try to replicate or make something similar.

I didn't want to leave the back of the buttstock blank, so just for fun I went to ChatGPT and generated a classic ancient Greek-style naked man on the hunt (that's literally what my prompt sounded like). The generation's results were sometimes surprising, sometimes frightening, and sometimes hilarious. But there were still a couple of variations that seemed quite good to me – so I used them as a basis.

Modeling

To be honest, I made it a bit easier for myself: I already had a buttstock from a Remington 11, made entirely using subdiv, so after a slight reworking of the basic shape, I knitted it as a base.

The next step was to model the patterns in Blender, snap them onto the buttstock, and further refine them in ZBrush. I think, creating the patterns took me the longest time.

All the other elements on the buttstock were modeled in ZBrush. If I said that I had mastered this software, I would probably be lying. It wasn't the easiest thing, but I managed to do it pretty quickly.

The important thing is that I didn't go for a perfect result, because I knew that in the future I was going to texture the buttstock pretty worn out, so it would be even better if the sculpting was softer and sometimes not quite accurate.

Topology

To be perfectly honest, this model had no intention of being the basis for further production. My main goal was to create a striking and impressive piece for my portfolio, so the UV and topology of the model took a back seat. I wanted to achieve the highest possible degree of realism, so I spared no triangles in creating the low-poly, aiming for the highest possible texel level. By the way, I used four texture maps with a resolution of 8K and about 400 thousand triangles.

The UV creation for this model was done, as usual, first in Blender, where I created the seams, then in RizomUV, where the shells were straightened and corrected, and finally in Blender again, using the extremely useful UVPackmaster plug-in.

Texturing

Initially, I didn't have a clear idea of how the buttstock should look, so I started experimenting. I took the wood materials I had collected earlier, applied them to the buttstock, and started texturing.

The result, frankly, seemed pretty mediocre to me, so I made a few more variations of the basic wood material, and, disappointing as it was, I didn't like anything again – it was all wrong. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get a result that I could look at and say: "I've done it, that's it."

After finishing the larger forms, I started working on the smaller ones. Some of the small details were created using both alpha brushes and hand painting. I can recommend a couple of alpha brushes that have made my texturing process a lot easier: a small but extremely useful pack I found online, as well as my own pack, which contains many unique brushes, mainly for creating scratches and scrapes on objects. You can download this pack for free on my ArtStation page.

To create the weathered light areas of the wood, I created a layer that followed the main pattern of the wood, adding a significant degree of realism to the material as a whole.

I then duplicated this layer and lightened it up, giving some areas of the stock a particularly strong accent.

I found the alphas for the buttstock on Pinterest and made a little composition out of them.

Therefore, the Base color and Roughness channels looked like this:

Rendering

I believe that in order to create really high-quality renders you should pay special attention to the choice of references, especially real shots taken by professional photographers. So, exploring all sorts of photos on the Internet, I came across the workshop Manuel Ricardo, which specializes in making buttstocks and is incredibly creative and imaginative in the design of its social networks, in particular its Instagram page.

I was so inspired by my discovery that I had the idea to do something similar. The hand idea was an absolute experiment, I didn't think anything good could come of it, and unfortunately, my worries and fears only increased after the first test renderings.

At this point, I was already thinking of putting the idea of using a human character in the frame behind me, but a miracle happened and a friend of mine managed to find me a nice quality model with a good rigging, so I decided to return to the original idea again.

I had a persistent desire to create a place that resembled a museum as if my buttstock was an exhibit. I downloaded the whole environment from Quixel's Megascans. I think you might be surprised to know how I achieved the correct lighting: there is no light source in this scene, only the sky and all the light was adjusted using third-party objects that cast shadows.

The light of the planes is also important. If the planes were white, the result would be completely different:

In only one scene I used spotlights to visually separate and highlight the subject in the frame:

This is what my camera settings look like. It's important to note that I was texturing without the ACES color resolution plugged in, so I turned up the colors a bit in the Marmoset Toolbag's camera settings.

Here are my rendering settings:

Then I used the Nik Collection plug-in for Photoshop to add dust and scratching:

Conclusion

This project was started to practice sculpting and create a vibrant and exciting model without a particularly tight technical constraint. I think I've achieved my goal.

Never give up on your ideas halfway through is my main advice to beginners. I know a huge number of extremely talented artists, my acquaintances and colleagues, who make amazing works but refuse to finish them in the final stages. At such moments I feel a great resentment that such beauty, capable of inspiring and surprising, will never be seen.

Thoughts of dropping everything and forgetting also came to me while working on this project. Many times, when faced with one difficulty or another in the creation process, I found myself wishing I could put all the work I had done in a box and hide it somewhere. But every time I doubted what I was doing, I reminded myself that only by overcoming difficulties and setbacks and moving confidently toward my goal could I achieve something truly worthwhile and meaningful.

What I have learned from my time in 3D is that, unfortunately, or fortunately, truly exemplary and inspiring work can only be created by endlessly working on yourself and your mistakes, and by constantly moving forward.

Anastasia Prokopovich, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine