Creating a 3D Hand-Painted Weapon Tutorial

This tutorial will take you through the creation of a 3D hand-painted, low poly, stylized weapon intended for use in-game. We’re targeting a realistic polygon budget and texture size that could fit into many different types of games, including mobile. This process is the most effective workflow for a purely hand-painted art style that I have used during my years within the game industry creating 3D props, environment assets, and characters for various development teams.

Note: This tutorial assumes previous experience creating 3D assets for games and prior knowledge of the tools being used, so I move fairly quickly and don't go into as many details on the different softwares being used in order to focus more heavily on the process itself. There are many great foundational game art and software specific tutorials showcasing those aspects already, so I wanted to focus this particular one on the overall process that I have found most useful for hand-painted 3D art during my time in the game industry.

There’s over 4 hours of video content with audio voice-over guiding you through the entire process from start to finish. The tutorial is sped up and narrated over in order to make the final video more easily watchable, so it is not in real-time. 

In the tutorial I use 3ds Max for the modeling, however this part of the process can be easily translated to any modeling software that you prefer to use. 3D Coat is the same way, any application that allows you to paint directly on the model could serve this same purpose. Photoshop and the gradient map workflow for colors is dependent on if your image editing/painting tool has a similar functionality. Otherwise you could use other means to colorize your texture. The grayscale phase can work in any painting application though.

What you will get:

• 6 chapters of video detailing the entire creation process with audio, from start to finish all the way through the exporting phase
• All the project files, including the model (in the Max file, OBJ, and FBX), plus the layered PSD with grayscale and both diffuse color variants included.
• My Photoshop brushes used during this process.
• Also a text file including all the links to any tools or plugins that I use throughout the creation process, as well as some notes about the project files.

Thank you so much you for your support!