Making the Gun: Broad Strokes

In this blogpost, I am going to show you how I created the preliminary version of the first half of the gun model.

Breaking It Down

The lecturer advised us to first break down the parts of the model we're about to make into primitive shapes, so that's the first thing I did. The cylinder is... well, a cylinder. And the barrels are also cylinders, but they are hollow. Thankfully, Maya has a primitive for that, called a pipe.

So to create the cylinder, I went into the Polygon Shelf up top and created a Polygon Cylinder.  I played around with its transform until it matched the schematics (and other reference images).

Then I turned on Interactive Creation (Found under Create -> Polygon Primitives) and created a Polygon Pipe. I dragged my mouse to adjust its width, height and inner thickness. Then I hid the previously created cylinder using CTRL + H, because it was getting in the way of the front view of the gun. I moved the cylinder into place, once again adjusting its transform until it matched. The inner thickness of the pipe seemed a bit too thick, but thankfully I could still edit it through the Channel Box, under the Poly Pipe History section.

I brought the cylinder back into the scene by clicking on it in the Outliner and pressing SHIFT + H. A bit of the pipe was inside the cylinder and I realized some of its faces would never be seen. I pressed F11 to enter Face selection mode and highlighted all the faces I needed to remove. Then I pressed the Delete key and poof, they were gone. Finally satisfied with the pipe, I pressed CTRL + D to duplicate it. I then aligned its duplicate to its corresponding spot and ta-dah! Two Scattergun barrels.

In between the two barrels is a bit that joins them together. For this I thought it was best to use a simple Polygon Cube. I dragged it out into a more of a rectangular cuboid, down to the cylinder of the gun. As previously, there was a face inside the cylinder, so I deleted it. On the schematic, the shape of this part seems to slant upward a bit, so I pressed F10 to enter Edge selection mode. I selected its upper edge on the cylinder side and dragged it up to match the schematic.

Of course, bits of the shape were now inside the pipes. To remedy this, I subdivided the existing shape by four. This created new faces I could edit. I grabbed the two middle faces on either side and dragged them in from the pipes, effectively hiding them from sight. This of course means they aren't needed. I hid the barrels, hightlighted the unseen faces and deleted them.

Once that was done, I decided to do the part underneath the barrels. I started with a Polygon Cube, whose edges I dragged out to match the side view schematic. The front view revealed that a bit of a more rounded shape was required. To create one, I decided to Bevel the bottom edges, adding the necessary roundness. After lots of dragging around of vertices, edges and faces, I managed to get the shape I wanted... except bits of it were in the pipe. I broke down the back and front top edges by adding divisions (Edit Mesh -> Add Divisions) and hid them in the pipe's faces. Then I deleted them, as they were out of sight.

Half the gone's roughly done. I think that about covers it for primitive shapes, too! In my next gun post, I will finish off the other half of the gun, this time likely utilising curves. See ya then!