Creating a Stylized Revolver in Blender

Introduction

Hi, my name is Vitaly, I’m 26, and I'm a freelance 3D artist. I've worked on mobile and VR projects.  

I don’t have any specialized education in 3D art. I learned about 3D at school but gave it up for several years. I started learning and practicing it again, this time for real, after the university and the army (mid-2017).

Pink Tank and Pink Revolver: Inspirations

Pink Tank from about 2 years ago was made for fun, as well as the following projects. I find the idea of making something different every once in a while interesting. I can’t say for sure what was the inspiration for choosing such colors, but it was probably the entourage of street neon signs and the way their differently colored lights smoothly mix together.

In the case of Pink Revolver, I was inspired by Metal Pie's concept. In addition, I wanted to make something that wouldn’t take a lot of time but would bring pleasure from finishing it. Speaking of time, the project took three evenings.

Working in Blender

When working in Blender, you can’t work without addons, any experienced Blender user will tell you that. HardOps, BoxCutter, Modifier list were quite useful for working on the revolver.

Here are my most frequently used hotkeys and custom pie menu commands created using Pie Menu Editor addon:

References and Modeling 

For the revolver, I looked for references when required during the modeling stage.

I often used Slash for separating objects or placing one object into another. In the video below, I demonstrated how Slash works and the application of Bevel Weight from HardOps.

For the Bevel modifier, I set the method to Weight instead of the default Angle. You can configure it in the panel on the right side in the HardOps tab. 

This is the modifier stack that was used for most of the objects:

An example of modeling a part of the scope holder:

And the drum:

Materials and Lighting

Materials are very simple:

Transparent and glowing parts:

I started to work on the lighting by adding an HRDI. 

The light was set up in such a way as to create reflections that would benefit the model the most. Since the model has two colors — pink and yellow, — I added colored light sources to make the renders more attractive. The selection of the colors was based on the principle of the triadic color scheme.

I used 3 blue light sources with different settings in the scene to achieve a gradient effect: a small one to create a sharper highlight and two larger lights for a more "filling" effect. The same principle was used for white light sources. They were necessary to neutralize the blue color so that pink and yellow stayed the same.

Flashlight: 

Settings in Eevee:

Post-Processing

Finally, I did a bit of post-processing in Photoshop. I import the final images from Blender as smart objects so that the Smart Sharpen filter is applied as a smart effect — this allows me to change the sharpening parameters non-destructively. Then. I add a little bit of contrast and vignetting. 

The same process was also used for the artist's FN SCAR model. You can find a breakdown here. 

Vitaly Rush, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev