Sci-Fi Gun

I made a sci-fi gun, recently as part of the monthly Polycount Noob Challenge

I spent a few days on this, using the opportunity to get better acquainted with the Substance Designer/Painter workflow.  Allegorithmic has some brilliant and cheap (in sales) software for texturing.  I have been using the Substance painter program since in the beta stages, and it has come a long way since then.  I have begun to favour this over Quixel Suit.  I'm not a fan of DDo and love the flexibility of Designer, creating custom masks using world-space-normals, custom FX, and then taking the result into painter to tweak and make it look less "one button press for generic material A".

GIFs are simple to create; Marmoset>gifmaker.me>imgur.com
I have a softspot for these over Marmoset viewer/sketchfab

Original concepts by Matthew Harris

I went for a retro sci-fi feel, with orange to compliment the blue glow

The base model is pretty well optimised, using very few triangles.
This time round I did not optimise the normals/smoothing groups, which reduces an invisible vert count, which can be seen using a maxscript called Uber vert count

Creating a presentation Template in Photoshop simplifies the process

Nothing too special about the UVs - Selected which parts to share space or be unique.  (My gun is not totally symmetrical)

This is Substance Designer 5.  The graph shown actually has multiple graphs embedded (from the list on the left)
A very stream-lined way to combine multiple substances

Overall I'm quite happy with the result.  I learned quite a bit and got it done in a lot less time than allocated.  It's kind of in-between realistic/stylised, which I like, but could be looking sweeter with practice.  Saying that, this is my first ever 3D gun!