Art Spotlight: Sombra's Gun

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hello, I am Dark-Minaz, a Freelance 2D and 3D Designer with a passion for Swords, Guns and pretty much anything that looks like “fun” to model.

I started in Computer science and move then to a one-year study in Gamedesign at Quantm in Switzerland. Now I am living in the Kingdom of Wonder, Cambodia and do my best to improve my Art. Currently, I’m at around 168 Models on Sketchfab. 

Process

I enjoy Blizzards models quite a lot, so I did a few before, but I wanted to create something that is new and wasn’t done on Sketchfab yet. So the plan was to model Sombra from Overwatch and her little gadgets.

So to start I asked a fellow Sketchfab Master to get me some screenshots from Overwatch, as sombra just got released. Added all the images I could find on Google and some concept art Sketches from the devstream at Blizzcon.

Since I do not have a huge poly limit thanks to Sketchfab I decided to settle in the “Medium Poly” area, so smooth edges smoothed to a certain degree, the rest with a Bevel. I decided to start with some basic blocking at First.

I tend to follow the base shapes but sometimes change a few items that I personally don’t like. In this case I slightly changed the Grip area but left most of the rest the same.

Since the faces Inside only waste polygons I deleted all of those as well. Saves some texture space in the end.

Once I got the main Parts done I  did assign a few materials just to see it I got the overall look or if something does look off.  

Now all what was left to do is add the tiny details and move over to 3d coat to create the uv’s.

You might be asking yourself, why not just do the UV directly in the modeling tool, great question. 3D coat offers a lot more control over the UV and instantly shows me the result of each unwrap, so I already know how each little piece will look like.

For this model I got away with automatic and around 20 minutes of fixing. What is quite a short time for such a clean UV that fills out the entire space rather well.

Once I got the unwrap done I exported it and created some textures in Substance Painter and exported it directly to Sketchfab.

Sketchfab’s Involvement

Sketchfab to me is a wonderful quick way to show 3D art the way it is meant to be displayed. With a quick way to export out of most Major programs and a fast way to setup a scene to display all the areas of your Model.

Sketchfab and PBR in general, does not really have any big limitations, what makes it extremely simple to just model the way I want, add some nice textures where I don’t have to think about Rendertime.