Worn Sauer M30 Luftwaffe Recreated with ZBrush & Substance 3D

Introduction

Hello, my name is Anastasia Prokopovich. I am a 3D Weapon/Hard Surface Artist, currently working at ENTANGLED game studio. During my time at work, I managed to participate in the creation of games that had not yet been released at AAA and AA levels. Unfortunately, I cannot share their names just yet. On October 25, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was released, in the work of which I was directly involved.

About the Sauer M30 Luftwaffe Project

When creating my latest Remington 11 project, my main reference for the rendering was photos of the work of the renowned Manuel Ricardo workshop, which specializes in making buttstock exclusively from wood.

As I looked at these incredible stocks, it was clear to me that my next project had to be a re-creation of one of their masterpieces.

Modeling

The most important thing to do before you start modeling is to collect as many references as possible of the object you want to recreate. I made the Sauer M30 model completely using the Subdivision Surface technique, which took me about five days. You may notice that there are some bumps on my object, which I decided not to fix, as it will not affect the final result, and there was no sense in wasting time fixing them.

The most complex and interesting shape to model in terms of subdivision was the gear case, which consists of two connected spheres merging into a single plane.

Topology

As the work was only created for inclusion in the portfolio and publication on ArtStaton, I didn't think much about the topology and didn't try to optimize it. So, my model is made up of about 500,000 triangles.

The UV creation process was the most standard: seaming and unwrapping in RizomUV and packaging using the UVPackmaster 4 addon in Blender.

Texturing

I was lucky enough to find the basic pattern of my future wood material in one of the free pattern kits on ArtStation. Unfortunately, the resolution of the image was much lower than I had expected, so I tried to increase it as much as possible, using AI and additional tweaking in Photoshop.

Assign the base color:

Add the wood texture we found earlier:

Add light elements between layers with patterns and fill color for more expression:

Add texture to the main wood pattern with stains and lines that mimic real wood samples:

Also, add additional light and dark accent lines throughout the texture of the wood:

Add an additional light pattern to imitate the fibers of the wood:

Also, add elements to imitate pressed areas – in the future, we can create damaged wood here:

Use the height channel to extrude elements of the main pattern:

Create a damaged wood effect by adding scratches and roughness:

The final touch is to apply mud to the areas of wood damage:

Finish working on the material, adjusting roughness:

In the same way, the material of the wood was also made for the bed:

Rendering

On the official Instagram account of the Manuel Ricardo workshop, I found a great idea for a rendering of this rifle. In many of the photos, the rifle was shown on the shoulder, and I really wanted to repeat this.

To make this idea come to life, I thought a Wild West-style character would be perfect. The next step was to find a suitable HDRI map. The goal was to find a map with a warm autumn atmosphere. There were no light sources in the scene except the  HDRI map — so the renders looked more realistic. The most important moment in the rendering process was the post-processing, as the model of the chosen character was much more low polygonal than the rifle I created, which, of course, had a negative impact on the final quality of the renders. So, I had to do a lot of editing on the final shots in Photoshop to achieve the photorealism I wanted.

Summary

Finally, I want to say that I am quite satisfied with the result of my work. I think I did a much better job of creating the wood material this time than I did last time when I created the Remington 11. The funny thing was that without realizing it, I was able to perfectly match the style of Sadie Adler's character from Red Dead Redemption 2, as subscribers informed me in the comments of the work.

I would like to advise beginner 3D artists to reconsider their approach to creating renderings of their work: reject boring and one-type shots on green fabric and red table found and downloaded from Quixel, and try to compare them with professional photographs, which often already have a correct composition and idea.

Anastasia Prokopovich, 3D Artist