AS VAL

**-DENNEHY-** · 03-17-2010, 12:20 AM

YAYYYY RENDER FAIL!!! about the third model I have ever made, this one has a slide and folding stock. Anyone want to skin it? ill give you a cookie...

**Zero-Saber** · 03-17-2010, 01:51 PM

What IS it? Some sort of surpressed AR?

**Naota** · 03-17-2010, 06:04 PM

Ever heard of the VSS Vintorez? This is essentially the AR configuration of the same rifle, consisting of something like 70% of the same parts and sporting a 20-round magazine and folding stock. It's also a rifle which fires my favourite type of bullet - subsonic SP-6 (Or perhaps SP-5?) rounds.

**-DENNEHY-** · 03-17-2010, 08:34 PM

Bingo 9x39mm. A beautiful little package of extreamly hard hitting power. Im working on the Vintorez Version next which should just include making the clip smaller, adding a stock and a good old PSO-1. That will be my fourth model.

**Oelund** · 03-17-2010, 09:15 PM

The magazine shouldnt get slimmer in the middle. it is correct that it is slightly wider at the buttom, but the main part of the magazine is the same width all over.
The charging handle slot in the dust cover should go all the way back to the safety (the exact shape of the safety when the safety is engaged)

The sights need more detail (both front and rear sight)

Here are some reference pictures for you:
http://www.pixagogo.com/2702114220

**-DENNEHY-** · 03-18-2010, 12:27 AM

Could you instruct me on how to make the shapes that subtract from the model? like if I want to make a hole, I could make one and stick it through the object resulting in a hole. I really need to learn how by now.

and ehh... did you take those pics? like do you own that?

**Oelund** · 03-18-2010, 10:00 AM

You could make holes by using a boolean object. But I'll strongly advice against that. boolean usually result in very messy meshes, which are very difficult to work with later on. (not to mention a waste of polygons)

I've whipped up a quick tutorial on how you can make a VAL dustcover, showing off a few different techniques. It is avaible in the spoiler below.

The pictures are from a gallery by Deicide. he collects pictures of weapons with models and artists in mind.
The entire gallery can be found here
http://www.pixagogo.com/DeicideNBF
It is still growing, and I've submitted a couple of pictures to it myself.

Anyway, here is the tutorial:

Spoiler:

This is just one way of doing it. You might also get away with it by simply extruding a box and shaping it into the shape of the dustcover. But I personally like manually placing vertices and building the faces between them when I'm working with complex and irregular shapes.
It might look like it'd be a lot of work to do it this way, but its actually quite fast.
This is not entirely how I'd do an object like this. but I'll be trying to get through as many different modeling techniques as possible, to show off the different methods you can work with.

We start by putting a good reference picture in as the background of a viewport. then we create a simple box anywhere in the world.

Then use edit mesh and manually create vertices along the edges of the reference picture (where ever you can see there is a shape change in the reference)

When done it should look something like this

Now add the depth of these verteces. the VAL dust cover slopes a bit toward the top where it becomes round.

Now its time to build the faces in between. It might take a little while getting used to creating faces so they are connecting the correct vertices without having sharp bends or are facing the wrong direction.
The general rule is to place a face so that it is as big as possible, and avoid getting super thin and stretched faces.

When done building the faces, you should have something that looks like this.

Now copy and mirror that side of the dustcover. delete the part of the mesh that is around the ejectionport, and rebuild it according to what the other side of the gun should look like. In this case you can dublicate the rear buldge and move it forward to each of the forward buldges (sorry I didn't get more pictures of this process)
After that attach the mirrored object to the main object.
It is important when you work with objects that have been mirrored that you select the non-mirrored object and then attach the mirrored one to that.
3d max doesnt handle mirrored objects very well, and they often mess up when put into games.
So when ever you have mirrored something, create a new object and attach the mirrored object to this object (and then delete the mesh of the object you created in case you dont need it)

When you have the two sides attached to each other, start building the faces in between.

Now select the faces of the cross-cover buldges and extrude them.

Then narrow down the extruded parts.

Weld the lower set of vertices together like so.

select the top buldge faces

and extrude them like you did with the cross-buldges.

Now we want to smooth the edge of the rear part of the cover, so we select the rear faces.

and likewise extrude and narrow it.

..continued in next thread...

**Oelund** · 03-18-2010, 10:01 AM

Spoiler:

...continued...

Now we want to make the hole for the cover retaining latch, which happens to be exactly where this selected face is.

Since we need the hole to be exactly along the lines of an existing face we also select the faces above and below it, and extrude them by 0.01 units (making it be in pretty much the same place as it was before.

we now select the top and buttom set of vertices and weld them.

We can now select the face where we want the hole...

..and narrow it down.
If we didn't go through the hole process of selecting the neighbor faces and extruding them as well, and then welding it, we'd end up with two faces with an area of 0 along the line that splits the two faces.. and that is bad.
Should our hole however have been smaller than the face we extruded it from then there wouldnt be a problem, becouse the face would then have a positive area.

It is now a simple matter of extruding the face inward to create a hole.

Now to make the inner parts of the dust cover. you could either just dublicate what you got now, scale it down a bit and invert the faces. that'd make the weapon truely hollow like it would be in real life, but that would also waste quite a few faces. So we'll make a very simple inward extrution to make up the ejectionport.
First create a vertex at the lower corner of the ejectionport.

Then start building faces, covering the entire ejectionport.

Which should look something like this.

Now extrude the face inward to create the hole.

Notice that this will create some faces below and infront of the hole, which you don't want, so just delete them.

You should now have something that looks something like this.

**-DENNEHY-** · 03-18-2010, 12:41 PM

................I love you........

I've never worked with a mesh before, only plane modeling. Yet from what you have just shown me, this looks much much better.

P.S. are you not a fan of using the symetry mod instead of mirroring?