Overview

A large, imposing SciFi energy pistol with a blocky, angular body and a ergonomically sculpted grip. The blue, scratched up theming invokes a more industrial, well-used feeling to the model. Its polygon count is reasonably low, and should work in most everything from Unity games to VRChat models without issue. Features 4K textures, glowing emissive details, and shiny PBR materials.

TRIANGLES
2368
TEXTURE RESOLUTION
4096 x 4096
UNITY SHADER TYPE
Standard (Specular Setup)

Model

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Details

This pistol model was originally created for the starter weapon on the GPong project, but a couple of my friends convinced me to try my hand at actually selling it on the Unity Asset Store. The base idea for this was a big energy pistol that shot bolts that, instead of doing damage, would burst and push things away from the impact site. Most of the greebling was planned around the idea of “solid state energy pistol”, and thus was made in a way that no parts should look like moveable bits. The model was made in Blender and textured in Substance Painter.

This would be the first serious project of mine after purchasing a full indie license for Substance Painter, rather than just running the limited trial period. I do have to say that I quite like how it came out, even though it took me much longer than I would have liked to finish painting, and there were quite a few lessons learned along the way.

Lesson One, for me, was to remember to properly Triangulate the mesh in Blender before sending it over to Substance Painter; I had thought that FBX exports didn’t support quads, but I was incorrect, apparently. This really showed itself when I exported the textures out and plugged them back into the Blender model and then into Unity, wherein the painted glowy rail lines you can see along either side of the body went really squiggly, due to the differences in how Blender and Substance interpret quads. In trying to fix this issue, I reimported the triangulated mesh into Substance and then immediately learned that Substance is really weird in how it handles channel masks, as it seems to have remembered which polygons I used the Polygon Fill tool on. This turned my materials into some weird looking broken-glass effect, and I ended up having to repaint most everything in.

Lesson Two, start in PBR (Metal Rough) mode and then swap down if needed; it does not work the other direction. I had put the project into SpecGloss (Non-PBR) as this was originally intended for Garry’s Mod (Source Engine), which did not support PBR materials natively. This, unfortunately, lead to some loss in potential quality, in my eyes. However, I did what I felt I could to port it back into PBR SpecGloss and to up the quality as best as I could.

Lesson Three, make sure that all the UV Map islands are as orthogonal as possible, as Substance does not do any anti-aliasing for material edges. I had to do quite a bit of cleanup in Photoshop because of jaggies along diagonal bits.

Image Gallery

 
 
 
 
 
 
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