I have a passion for meticulous detail. This has gotten me into some rough spots at school in the past, where I selected projects that are out of scope, and worked myself into exhaustion trying to meet the deadline… and then failing to do so. The AKM and Glock 17 are still unfinished; someday soon, they will get the bakes and texturing they deserve.

Why are they unfinished? Because I found something even more demanding of my time and sanity, Wesley Tippetts’ Ornate AK-47 concept art. After seeing this thing, how could I resist the temptation to model it?!

Reference

I looked through photos of ornate wheel lock guns for hours on Google and Pinterest, trying to find any that had elements used in Wesley’s concept. Eventually, I just asked him, and he led me to this decorated rifle. Later that day, I found this Heinrich Barella double barrel shotgun with a few other details on it as well. For the magazine and dog-spring cover, I searched through classic paintings of deer hunts and found works by Paul De Vos.

Workflow Considerations

With modern tools, there are many ways to get something done. Ornate details can be sculpted by hand, assisted by alphas and the deformation tab in ZBrush, boolean operations, and all of that can get baked down from a high poly. Or they could be stamped on in Substance Painter after making an alpha and then use anchor points to drive generators. Some of these options require UVing a base mesh for the high poly, others can be done with projection, and some can wait until texturing. Selecting your approach depends on how much time you have, destructive vs non-destructive workflow, and what the end goal for your mesh is.

From the start, I knew this gun would be looked at from every angle. I would need interesting surface features where possible and as much topology as necessary to capture all the details. Because of this, I didn’t focus on dense topology in any specific area but rather made all the topology necessary to capture the silhouette of the weapon from all angles. Considering the curvature of this weapon and its number of parts, I knew the triangle count was going to be high – the final count was just over 40k.

Diving In Modeling

I am always intimidated by my projects. The most difficult part of any project for me is to actually get started – I overthink the process and get demoralized when things aren’t going as expected. But all of those feelings disappear when I start moving around verts and remind myself that control + z is always there. With little more than the concept art to work with, I opened Maya, imported Wesley’s art as an image plane, created a cube, and started working. Looking at the concept and having a bit of knowledge of how modern and antique guns are built, I broke down the rifle into its basic parts and modeled them individually. Making it even easier, complicated forms were broken down into their basic shapes, then booled and dynameshed together in ZBrush.

The final blockout ready for more complex boolean operations: