New project new skill set.

   Second project came a round fast, it's surprising how quickly this year is going! Must be enjoying myself a bit more. The last project went well, despite it currently being unfinished, and the reason being, I was trying to learn too much at once. So for this project I decided to do the partially stylized prop brief (The chainsaw gun combo one). Not only does this one look like a brief I can enjoy, its also one that I only need to focus on a few small things with. High > Low poly baking, modelling, unwrapping and texturing. With the texturing phase begin done in substance painter of course. Allowing me to learn more of the program and expand my knowledge of singular asset creation as well.

Starting project brief concepts.

   Here are the concepts we're given at the start, with the aim being to improve them and make them plausible and more practical as weapons. For example, a few of them have electrical leads. So are they plugged into the mains, or do they have an external power pack you attach to your back, or something? Not something I'd personally like the have to carry around in all honesty.
   The main problem I faced when starting this project was that, if I start something like this, I tend to get caught up in a lot of the nitty gritty technical elements. A Prime example being, the pump of the shotguns isn't accessible due to the placement of the saws, not to mention it'd be far to heavy to carry. Also to attach something like that to a shotgun would take a lot of carefully paced welding or something other than duct tape and bolts, yes bolts might work but whatever you bolt into on the saw or gun is going to effect how the gun/saw works and could quite easily break it. See I already feel like I could spend all 3 weeks coming up with some better, more practice and maybe even weapons that could actually function during an apocalypse. But that's not the brief and I don't have time for that.
   So what I did, is throw some of that out, and aim to focus more on the texturing side of this project. One week has passed and I've concepted with orthographics, modelled and unwrapped the gun, to a standard I'm happy with. The orthographics are pretty basic, but the concept I feel is clear and gets the concept across nicely.

original concepts

Colour pallets for power tools.

Colour pallet tests.

Orthographics.

   I changed out the shotgun to a lever action one, as I think its more practical. I also added a power supply for the saw and bolted everything together. Other than that I tried to stay true to the original concept.

Model back LHS.

Wire frame front RHS.

And here's my unwrap, I try to pack everything as close as a can. But I think I can make it that little bit closer if I rearranged it all over again. 

UV.

   The model its self sits at 9,949 tris with the limit being 10,000. It fluctuated a lot towards the end as I removed some of the symmetry seems on certain mesh sections. Along with faces you wont be able to see. Even through the unwrapping process I kept noticing faces I had missed and other geometry I didn't need. To combat this I added more geometry towards the end of the unwrapping to bring my tri count closer to the limit.