Apocalyptic weapon finished.

   This weeks been the final week of the second project of the year. This one went much better than the first. I gave my self plenty of time for texturing, and I planned the project more efficiently overall. The whole week has been spent texturing, continuing from where I left off last week. I feel I've made huge steps with substance painter and I feel I can texture things more efficiently now. It almost feels like cheating, almost.
   After I'd finished texturing, I realized it needed too look a lot dirtier, so I did a pass of dirt. The grime and muck really brought the gun to life whit not a lot of effort at all.

Before dirt.

After dirt. (Final)

After dirt. (Final)

   As you can see the dirt adds a better sense of realism to the gun. 

   This project has really pushed my knowledge of single asset creation. I found this a really enjoyable and interesting project to do over the last one. As I could solely focus on a single asset. Overall I cant think of anything that went bad. My modelling was smooth and quick, both high poly and low poly versions. I'm increasingly tightening up my UV's giving better texturing results. I also gave myself a huge amount of time for texturing, so I could both learn more of substance painter and achieve good results for the hand in.

   If I was to improve this project further I would go back to the model and add additional geometry to the high poly. Such as indents on the chain guard and saw body. I would also add more bolt heads on the chain guard on the low poly. Along with adding an additional style of bolt to mix up the model a little. Rather than having the same one for everything. On the UV I also planned to separate half of the bolts to a different part of the UV allowing a different texture to be put on them, as they all currently look identical. Normals became a problem on my model too, the problem lies in the geometry itself. After trying numerous times to edit the normals with a modifier, I came to the conclusion that I could have built my model better. Making it so I didn't need to edit the normals at all. Yet another thing I would improve if I had the time to continue. Overall I feel this has been a very enjoyable project and I've learnt so much from it.