Hi all,

Tired to do something a bit different from all my previous weapons, its inspired by personalised and engraved guns that are quite common place in hunting and things like that.

This actually took a very long time to create (even though the output might not look like it) and involved a lot of reworks :-( I sketched the design on paper (as you can see in the background of the first image) then scanned it,
traced it in illustrator. Once I was happy with the design motif, used it as a guide in zbrush and created a full 3d engraved relief (see last image) the first 3d model I did had too much depth and when applied as a diffuse texture and ended up looking very flat and fake (as there was no normal map to fake depth, like foils for example) So I went back to Zbrush and started again,
this time trying to keep the relief as shallow as possible while still being readable from a distance. Once I had something that was working I rendered it and used that as my base texture, then spent a long time tweaking
values inside photoshop and playing around with styles in the workbench.

I initially started with the custom paint job style but because that style does not take into account the colour of the texture in the specular highlights, it ended up looking like the engraving was underneath a thick lacquer. So I decided to use the patina style as it uses the textures colour to tint the specular, which helps to make the gold elements more convincing but this style has a draw back as it only allows you to edit the central metal part of the gun (not the stock or barrel) but I felt that this was the best of the options available that I could find.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it as it was an experiment as much as anything else. Hope you like it however.

Cheers,
Chris