Category Archives: Substance

(Start of) A Pistol

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I started grey boxing a glock type pistol to put in unreal. It went much smoother than I guessed it would. This was my first time trying to go from zero to 100 with using primarily reference images instead of just throwing things into blender to see what happens.

Now there’s a bunch of things missing, mostly in the controls side but I think I got a base to keep going and properly zone out each region to eventually add animations.

The biggest problems are: 1.) The back grip looks kinda bad and flat. 2.) There are no grip plates on the sides which I’m not a fan of. 3.) There’s no rail up front for mounting flashlights are whatever. 4.) the bottom and top slide don’t fully touch so there’s a small gap:

What’s straight missing is: Slide release, mag release, any text indicating what the gun is, and finally I didn’t make the mag this time around.

I think there’s also some more beveling I can do around the edges of the top slide to get things cleaner and smoother looking. But to be honest starting this surprised me, I didn’t think I had it in me to get a recognizable glock modeled, let alone getting UV’s reasonable enough to pull into substance. Definitely I’ll try to keep on this to get a base weapon into unreal.

How the hell do I open these doors

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Answer: A bunch of number keys and a non-de-script knob

Now I see how damn clean that scroll wheel guard is and I hate it…

Past week I spent time making a keypad for the doors in one of my previous posts. This guy took some doing: specifically because 1.) I didn’t know that grids in blender existed and 2.) the coloring on the keys made me anxious every-time I tried to make something.

Here’s the greybox:

I had a bunch of iterations here but the three main things were having a keypad, a indication LED and a screen. My hope is to hook this baby up to the doors i made previously to have a quick key code minigame thing in unreal.

By far the hardest part was making not the keypad keys but the plate that would go in between the keys and surround them. One of the biggest things I always try to prevent when using blender is having any issues with normals. Usually it’s hard to come by them if you model in a proper manner (which can be summarized to: always make quad faces.). However, in this case I thought I could use a boolean modifier to make the plate which turned out pretty bad:

With the keys
Without the keys

You can see here the whole face is messed up however in blender things were looking fine. I don’t have an image for what it looked like but basically it was the keyholes with a subtraction modifier then beveled. Here’s quick demo of what I did:

Step 1. make a bunch of cubes, add an x and z array modifier to each then apply.
Step 2: add a difference modifier to the plate mesh
Step 3, select all of the forward face, the ctrl+b and bevel that

Now there’s some disconnect because if you pull this into substance (I didn’t do this with the demo) all hell breaks loose and your normals are thrown into a rock tumbler to get that keypad image above.

However I got past it by using the now holy grid:

Praise be to the grid baby

Which is a bit more painful for inital creation because you have to line it up with your keys but once you do it’s just a quick insert faces, then delete command.

Pretty much that, assume there are perfect squares infront of each face, then I deleted each key face ans solidified + beveled

But anyways It seems to look fine in game:

The knob doesn’t have the notches I want, but I can easily make the screen look like it’s on with emissives:

Pretty cool, now I gotta hook it up and import the new doors to start fleshing out this building.

MoreDoor (modor?)

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Took another crack at making a door today. This time around I focused on two things.

1.) Make the window smaller

2.) Use more normal mapping over geometry

Getting this setup in blender was much simpler this time around:

By avoiding details everything went by quicker in this stage. Only thing that took time was getting bevels right but really that’s like a 2 minute process. Once it was in substance I went crazy with some of the built-in normal modifiers. However it turned out much better than I expected.

I’m really digging the way the paint turned out, giving it that worn future painted feel. That being said the screws should probably have more wear on them, which I attempted to do but didn’t figure out how to add a mask paint layer until mid-writing this post.

Only issue right now is that the door feels barren and the handle seems out of place. I’m thinking I’ll try pulling it into unreal and adding decals dynamically (probably something like children’s drawings, posters, etc.). However that handle is a straight up eyesore. Also you can see the borders of the brush I used around the window:

I can go back and touch it up if I think it looks alright in unreal.