Recreating Browning Buck Mark Semi-Automatic Pistol With Blender & Substance 3D

Introduction

Hi! My name is Jack, and I'm a self-taught 3D Weapon and Prop Artist from New York. Video games were a huge part of my childhood. Some of my earliest memories are playing Halo: Combat Evolved on my original Xbox with some of my closest friends.

Even though video games were my favorite pastime, I subconsciously wrote it off as just a hobby and never considered it a career I could pursue. I instead chose to pursue a career in the film industry and attended Pratt Institute for Film Production. That is until the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic when I found myself stuck inside with nothing but time. I decided to challenge myself and learn 3D. What started as a fun pastime quickly consumed my every waking moment, making me realize that 3D Game Art was the career I always wanted to pursue.

A little Background

While a big chunk of my journey has been self-taught, I've also been fortunate to have some super-talented people help guide me. In 2021, I was connected to Todd Sue (Art Director at Respawn Entertainment) through a family friend. What began as an email seeking general advice turned into a multi-year, ongoing mentorship without which I wouldn't have grown as much as I have.

As a young artist early in their career, it's easy to get intimidated by all the industry's great talent. Understanding the decisions and steps required to create work at that level can be overwhelming. Todd has been pivotal in bridging the gap of knowledge and teaching me some of the steps needed to make work at a higher level.

Over the past four years, I've tried my hand at a few disciplines, including environment art, but found myself drawn to weapon and prop art. I love the personal connection a player forms with these tools they wield in the game. In many ways, these props take on their own sense of character. So, I find the process of creating these mechanical "characters" to be very rewarding. 

The Buck Starts Here

The Browning Buck Mark Project was part of a group mentorship program under Weapon Artist Justin Frazee (Senior Hardsurface/Weapon Artist at BulletFarm), so a huge thanks to him and the rest of the mentees for the feedback and guidance they all gave throughout the process. My projects so far have been less optimized and focused on leveling up my artistic ability. This project's goal was to continue to raise the bar of my texturing and presentation while adhering to strict budgetary constraints. I chose the Browning Buck Mark because of its unique shortened slide design, and I was attracted to the two-tone color scheme. 

The Browning website provided most of the references for dimensions and general shape. For weapons, if you can find original documentation, that's always ideal. Sometimes, manufacturer's websites will have limited images, so it's always worth the time to dig through Google to find images that give more insight into how parts fit together. It can be difficult to find internal images of some weapons, so I also used a game called "World of Guns: Gun Disassembly," which allows you to field-strip different kinds of guns to understand the internal layout. This is a decade-old game at this point, so I would only use it in tandem with other references to help get the full picture. 

The Power of Blender and Add-ons

The modeling process I use is pretty standard, so I'll briefly go over it but focus mainly on the add-ons I use in Blender to help speed up my workflow. 

To start, I use a combination of booleans and SubD. I start nondestructive with booleans, but once the shape is finalized, I'll duplicate and hide a mesh with the live booleans and apply the boolean on my active mesh. Finally, I'll use subdivisions with support loops to create my high-poly. Alternatively, you can use a remesh workflow that works similarly to ZBrush's DynaMesh. I find subdivisions give me more fine control, allowing me to create more varied edge weights. 

For the low-poly, I'll bring back that hidden mesh with the live booleans, apply them, and remove any edges that aren't contributing to the overall silhouette. 

Add-on Fun

Blender is a great program by default but can become markedly more powerful with paid add-ons. Here are some of my favorites for hard surface modeling:

• Hard Ops: It gives you quick access to all your modifiers within a cursor menu and combines multiple modifiers that would usually require manual setup into a one-click solution.

• BoxCutter: It allows you to skip Blender's default way to create booleans and, instead, allows you to draw booleans right onto your mesh or be projected from your view.

• MESHmachine: It lets you change or even remove any bevel you have applied and have fine control over bevel parameters after applying them.

This is just a small portion of what these add-ons offer, but even these seemingly simple improvements add up fast when working on a complex project. 

UVs & Baking

How I process my UVs inside Blender and make use of the Zen UV and UVPackmaster add-ons:

1. In Edit mode, navigate to the Select dropdown -> Sharp Edges, press U + M to bring up the UV tools, and mark the selected seams.
2. Look around your mesh for any edges that weren't marked. Take into account the player's POV when hiding seams.
3. Once the mesh is unwrapped, use Zen UV to straighten any UVs. The relax settings work best for islands with triangles or Ngons, and the Quadrify option works best for fully quad islands.

4. Now that all islands are straightened, use the UVPackmaster to pack your UV. The settings will vary depending on your texture resolution, so adjust your padding as needed. A precision of 1000 gives the best result but will take longer, depending on your system. I would also enable Normalize Islands, which ensures uniform texel density.

5. Always triangulate your mesh before sending it off for baking. Programs won't always use the same triangulation algorithm, so if you don't triangulate when exporting your mesh, you risk shading errors once you bring it into Marmoset Toolbag or Substance 3D Painter. 

Big, Medium, and Small Details

Texturing is easily my favorite part of the process, this is where you're able to craft the story for your weapon.

Some Setting to tweak (Substance settings):

• At Project Startup: Color Management -> OpenColorIO -> ACES 1.2
• Display - HDRI: Studio Tomoco
• Display - Anisotropic Filtering: Very High (16spp)
• Shader Settings - Specular Quality: Ultra (256spp)

When approaching texturing, I find it helpful to think in terms of big, medium, and small. This applies to breakup within channels and variance in wear, dirt, and oil build-up. Something I notice with beginner's work, including my early work, is a lack of diffuse and roughness variance. It's important to avoid making every material one value. Instead, pay attention to subtle value and hue changes in your references. I like to build up my materials channel by channel, so first, I dial in my starting diffuse and roughness values.

Check the Solo'd channels often to confirm adequate breakup.

Now that there is sufficient large-scale breakup between parts of the gun, I'll make medium- and small-scale breakups in the diffuse and roughness channels using fill  layers.

Any material is all about the story, how, where, and who was using your weapon. If it's for a personal project, create the character in your mind. Do they clean their weapon often? Is it with a rough rag or clean microfiber? Do they handle it with care or throw it around? It's important to think of these things early in the texturing process so you can make conscious choices about your textures. 

For this project, I did some research and found that Palestinian security forces sometimes use .22s as "less than lethal" secondary weapons. So for my project, I imagined my gun was used as a secondary for a security unit with wear that matches moderate usage with minimal direct cleaning and subtle dirt/grime build-up. 

Once that base was set, it was about building up the wear with fill layers and paint layers set to multiple to control how much of the fill was shining through and a level to create more separation in the fill layer. This was the foundation for most of the wear, and anchor points were used when needed to reference height information specifically for adding scuffs to the height of the brushing. 

The grip pattern was made from a pavement mask in Substance with a level and a blur filter to control the bump fall-off. It doesn't have the same variance as the reference and appears too consistent. So, looking back, I'd do it differently and instead try getting a high-resolution screenshot of the grip and making a custom mask to capture the randomness in the grip bumps correctly. There are always things to improve!   

Throw a Skin on It

This was also my first project where I messed around with creating some camos. One of them was meant to be a subtle nod to the Urban Camo from 2009 Modern Warfare 2. 

I used Substance's default camo generator but separated it into different layers to give more control. Then, I manually added and removed certain shapes until I got a balance I liked. I also used an anchor point setup to use the height info from the brushed metal to make scuffs on the camo layer.

I also went through and made changes to the color of certain metals, like the charging handle, top Picatinny rail, and trigger, to better match the aesthetic.

Lights, Camera, Render

All the rendering was done in Marmoset Toolbag 5. I like to set up a basic scene in MTB while I'm texturing in Substance, so I can jump back and forth to see the texturing changes I'm making in a more representative way. Here are the camera settings I like to change:

The main scene is comprised of some props from Megascans, some of which I made small value adjustments just so the colors weren't too distracting. I like to light in a naturalistic way, thinking about what light could be coming from practicals in the scene. 

Here, I'm using an HDRI at a very low value with four Directional Lights: one fill, one edge, one with a warmer color temp to create color contrast, and lastly, one to bring up the levels of the background to create more of a backlit silhouette.

It's important to understand how materials react to light and camera position. For example, materials appear more reflective as the camera and light become more level with the surface versus when the camera is parallel with the surface the material can appear flat.

It may seem simple, but never underestimate the importance of depth of field. The goal is to mimic the effect of taking a picture with a real camera I find an aperture of f4-8 to be sufficient depending on focal length.

Not all renders are destined for your final ArtStation upload. Here's an alternative look I never ended up posting using a red edge light:

Take Away's

I'm super proud of how this project turned out and grateful for the opportunity to share some of the process. That being said, I'm still learning new things every day and looking for my first opportunity in the industry. This project was completed in my free time between my day job and trying to maintain some kind of normal life schedule.

For other artists early in their journey, find what inspires you and chase it. It's not always easy, but the hardest things are usually the things most worth pursuing. Throughout a project, you'll go through all kinds of different feelings, from loving your work to hating it, then back again; just remember that dedication is what gets you over the finish line. Always be learning, set your own deadlines, and be an active learner, don’t be afraid to ask questions of artists you look up to, and don't let the fear of failure get in the way. Every roadblock is a new opportunity to forge a new path. 

As everyone says, reference is truly king. Don't fall into the trap of working off memory; instead, focus on finding quality references and try to replicate them as best you can. I think outside of just art, it's also important to study the mechanical function of certain weapons to better inform your modeling and how certain metals or woods are treated to inform your texturing.

That's a Wrap

Thanks again for taking the time to read this article, and thanks specifically to the 80 Level team, especially Gloria Levine, for the opportunity. I hope I was able to give some informative insight into my process and that you learned something along the way! If anyone has any further questions, I'd love to connect, so feel free to contact me directly on LinkedIn, Twitter, or ArtStation.

Jack Miles, Weapon & Prop Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine