Crafting a Realistic Vintage German Flare Pistol with Substance 3D & UE5

Introduction

Hello, dear friends. My name is Lyuba, and I'm a Middle Weapon Artist at the ENTANGLED studio. I am glad to be with you again and share the process of creating my new work. We met a couple of months ago in this project, where I told you some basic rules for creating realistic textures.

As for the main news that has happened to me lately, first of all, I took part in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. I am very happy to continue studying 3D and want to create even more weapons. I plan to try my hand at creating weapon concepts.

Today, in my article, I decided to focus on the texturing stage and put together a database of materials that helped me a lot in working with weapons and textures in general. It was a difficult choice for me, as I currently have several other more modern guns in development. It was interesting for me to try to create some complex, unusual textures; I still think learning a lot about this is necessary.

My latest project is a German flare pistol, Leuchtpistole 42, from World War II. I chose this project for the sake of improving my texturing skills. It seems to me that I choose each project because it would be interesting for me to draw in it and try unusual methods of processing materials.

This new project took me about two months of quiet work in the evenings after I came home from the office. Most of the time was spent on several alterations from scratch of the base metal material, as I was doing it for the first time in my life. Now, I'll show you the change processes, and you'll see how many mistakes were in the work.

The original plan was to make a rocket launcher painted with paint and a wooden handle. But I'm glad I eventually abandoned this idea because even at the initial stage, I saw that it would not look bright and interesting. I am often told that I can go far away from references in my work; this is the truth, and you can see it in this project.

Before Starting a Project

To be honest, this is my favorite meme about how artists share their work processes (today, I will do something similar). Here, the artist shows his initial stage of work, and then they show a cool, almost finished work. For the portfolio, I don't use all the optimization methods that we use in production. I want to go through the LP, UV, and bake stages as soon as possible, and I'm in a hurry to start texturing, so today, I will pay little attention to these technical aspects.

I want to start by leaving the most useful links with cool references of old weapons for you without further ado. I love looking at these photos.

I also want to recommend some useful training content, as I often see that many people have not watched these interesting tutorial materials. I've learned a lot from them, and I'm grateful they're on the internet. I strongly recommend visiting the ArtStation Learning page. There is a large selection of materials for teaching everything from modeling to advanced texturing. And what is very important at the beginning of a creative journey is that these materials are free.

Apart from this, I advise getting to know such cool artists as Dan Kenton, Eugene Petrov, Cohen Brawley, Tim Bergholz, Duard Mostert, Jason Ord, and Javad Rajabzadeh, who have their own training materials and some useful content on YouTube.

I don't want to spend a lot of time on the technical part of the project, as much has already been written about it. But I want to show you the basic data I am usually asked about in this project. The number of triangles is 25 thousand. I made the internal mechanisms and every bolt at the stage of creating a mid-poly model.

I chose the size of the texture map to be 4096x4096. For my portfolio, I choose a texel from 110 to 140 pixels. I advise you not to think about optimizing your project if this work is being done for a portfolio since, in all major games, triangles have not been saved for a long time, but they beat off everything with geometry. The only thing that can affect the productivity of the game is the number and size of texture sets. It is better to make fewer texture sets, and the 4K map will not go into the game, as this will greatly affect performance. Therefore, pay attention to the best optimization of UV space while maintaining a large texel density.

A little advice on packaging UV shells. I advise you to follow the same direction as some shells on complex textures. For example, I laid the sides of the bakelite handles in one direction so that it would be convenient to work with the fibers on the mask, which I created using procedural methods. Even in personal projects, I always use a little trick – I use the most minimal padding and margin because the map will not change size, which allows me to achieve the best texel density.

Cartridge Texturing

High-poly, low-poly, and cartridge texturing were done about three days in the evenings after the main job. At first, I didn't think about doing this because it seemed to me that it would be unnecessary work and it would not be worth distracting attention from the cannon. Spoiler: in the end, it turned out that I only made a couple of renders with this cartridge, skipping the animation stage. But it turned out to be more difficult than I thought, and I learned a lot anyway. 

For the first time, I textured this unpainted light metal with rocket launchers and paper. The paper was quite difficult for me. It was complex for me to achieve the required roughness and height of the material, as I did not understand the principle of creating this material in layers. As a result, it turned out to be a strongly sharp and matte layer with a lot of small colored and dark pieces of cellulose. 

I achieved the main effect with the help of large and medium color patterns of pollution. It's always easier for me to work from creating large forms; I have a fear of a white sheet of paper. So, I like to give as much dirt as possible right away and then refine the base layers and details. This is how I work at home, which is why it's difficult for me to share SPP files; it's a big mess. Of course, at work, I have to keep it all in order. The ideal hierarchy of layers is: A LAYER OF LARGE DETAILS ON THE NORMAL CHANNEL – THE BASE OF THE MATERIAL – DAMAGE – DIRT – POST-EFFECTS. That's where I usually turn on the lights and add high-pass to make the texture look very voluminous. I also like to add layers of AO and Curvature to achieve soft darkening in the shadows and highlights along the edges. But don't overdo it with these techniques; otherwise, the work will look stylized.

I work with each channel of the material separately. To begin with, I create an albedo from a variety of color gradients so that it has interesting patterns and gradients in which contrasting and blurred patterns are in balance. Then I work with the roughness channel – it should have all the color spots with albedo, so your iridescence will look better from every angle.

By the way, I prefer pipeline metal-roughness.

On the cartridge, I wanted to remember my old joke. INERT in Russian means educational, not combat. I used this stencil at one of my old jobs because I thought it was funny at the time, but the others didn't find it that way and decided to make fun of me. Now, it's been more than a year since that job, and so I decided to make a small reference to it. You can also use this template if you want. I described how to make such stencils from photos in my previous article.

Texturing Leuchtpistole

I think you've noticed that I like old and worn materials. For example, I did AGRAM 2000 a year ago, where I also worked with similar materials of old weapons.

In my opinion, old materials are easier and more interesting to create than modern and factory-made ones. Therefore, I sincerely do not understand why so few guys make such junk. When I first realized that I loved it, it was already very difficult for me to adjust to something newer. But of course, I've been doing this at work, for example, at COD recently. So, I sincerely recommend that every gun artist make some kind of cool old gun or prop in their briefcase. This will generally expand your portfolio for future job searches, but personally, I'm switching to something no older than 50; I just like to be older.

Texturing the Handle

I made a completely new material for the handle pads. I worked with a lot of references on this material, and in the end, I got something in between wood and bakelite. I drew an Albedo Map using grunge and stencils, took some photo textures, and used Photoshop and an AI-upscaler. Try to use the principle of beautiful spots – it won't necessarily be realistic, but the main thing is to be bright and beautiful.

Creation of Wood or Bakelite Material

In creating such materials, the most important thing is to create a beautiful albedo channel. I prefer to see it very saturated and contrasting, which is far from realism, but meets the principles of artistry.

Let's talk a little bit about milling cutters. It's always something that will make your old metal more tactile. I adore them very much and always add them everywhere, even where it is not completely clear from the reference. The main secret of creating milling cutters is to make them uneven in depth and add more variety in width. Always imagine how and when, with what tool this or that damage was done to the material, how many years have passed since the manufacture, and how the material was damaged and aged under physical stress.

The principles of damage creation that I followed when creating this work. Remember that damage is their main strength in his roughness channel. This is the most important channel for all the details. In simple terms, albedo works on a full-length view of an object, while roughness works on closeups. For me, roughness is always the most important person on the tier list. You can see it well in this old GIF.

So let's get back to the damage. On this old pistol, the texture of the old metal comes together with the damage, these are mostly deep matte scratches and chips that break the longitudinal milling cutter, break the shape and break the texture on which they are superimposed. Also, then I hammered a lot of dust and hairs into these large damages, which additionally brightened the appearance quite a lot, which is what I wanted in general.

Carving

Let's move on to the most interesting part – creating an engraving. To be honest, it was one of the simplest stages of the work, but it looks very impressive. Working with anchor points helped me the most in this job. I drew the basic flat drawing of the mask screen with my hands. Then I worked with the complication of the edges. using the high-pass filter, I lifted the edges and added an outline along the contour layers. I painted this flower mask with my hands. This is a meditative process that I was inspired by these Pinterest photos and engraving art.

In real life, no one would add these patterns to a real rocket launcher, but I liked them so much that I decided to decorate the barrel and the needlework with them.

My favorite moment always is the creation of dust and pollution materials. I usually create a complex metal base material first, then create damage masks – polishing, damage, chafing, and so on. Masks of dust and dirt are made in 5-7 layers. The most important thing is probably to add dust inside the texture using anchors – this way your fill does not become uniform, but lies exactly on the surface. Deep dusting seems to be rubbed into the base metal itself.

Rendering & Post Effects

One of the important secrets that I've been using lately is to try to set the light so that it catches the glare of the canvas and not just stand at a right angle to the model with a solid fill.

I will briefly explain my principle in very simple words. I add weak light from the hdr, then place two light sources of different diameters and brightness on the side of the frame. I like to make one light source cold and the other warm. I also try not to make my picture dirty due to the different lighting temperatures. That's why I prefer cool shades, just because I love it. Also, sometimes I can achieve this effect in Photoshop by adjusting the temperature.

As for post-processing, I love experimenting with Photoshop, as it is the program in which I spent my student years. I like light and rather contrasting renderings, and I always add noise (many people don't like this). I like Camera Raw for all this, it's softer and easier there.

There is now a trend in the weapons community towards character renderings. I find it very interesting, and I would like to try it myself. You can use a hand model from Eugene Petrov (but don't forget to specify the author).

Conclusion

Here's another one of my articles finished. Every time, I am very pleased to receive an invitation from the editorial staff and a positive assessment of my work. I am very grateful to dear editor Gloria from 80 Level. She is a wonderful professional in her field.

I hope that this information was useful to you. I can be found on ArtStation and LinkedIn, where I often share my new projects and communicate with everyone. Thank you, and have a nice day and some sharp edges!

Lyubov Vasileva, Weapon Artist