Making the Gun: A Fresh Lick of Paint

Though I was done modelling and applying materials for the most part, I wanted to explore some of the other tools Maya has to offer. One tool that caught my attention is the 3D Paint Tool, found right at the end of the Rendering Shelf. The tool can be used to paint over parts of a mesh's texture with the color of one's choice. I was going to use it on the barrels of the gun.


Before paint can be applied, the mesh in question needs to have a texture on it. This can be assigned through the Tool Settings, in the File Textures section.



Once done, you can pa... just kidding. After applying a bit of paint, I noticed no paint was being applied to a bit of the mesh. That's why it's probably for the best to check the mesh's UVs first. I opened up the UV Editor. The part of the barrel I was trying to paint on wasn't properly unwrapped. This was easy to fix. On the top navigation menu, I chose Polygons and scrolled down to and pressed Unfold. Voila, properly unwrapped (or unfolded) UVs.


Painting was a breeze afterwards. I painted the inside of the barrels black, then proceeded to paint the screws on the grip a darker shade of gray to make them stand out a bit more. Then I was done painting.

I think I am finally done modelling the gun. Though it's not very high poly, it is faithful to the schematics and the TF2 in-game model... or at least the reference images I could find. In my next blogpost, I will try to import the gun into UE4. Hopefully that process goes smoothly!

EDIT: I opted not to use the paint on the final model, as in-game, the player only ever sees it from the back.

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