[Titan]

Fair enough. Mind taking a moment to point out what's wrong with the mesh?

[Hades]

Roger that.

There are no smooth groups at all, for one. Another is the mesh work itself is very, very messy. Especially at the front, in front of the grip and behind the barrel. From what I can tell, it's fairly high-poly (around 5000 polygons?) which is a bit much for the small amount detailing it has. About the design itself, it's really cartoony. I'm not sure if you want it to be cartoony or not, but there you go. Reason is because of the proportions, I think. Also, at the top, under the ironsight, it has a hard edge while in front of that part, the top curves down into the side, which is weird.

[Titan]

Sweet, thanks for the input.

I'm not entirely sure how many poly's it has. I would have preferred to use normal maps in a few places, namely the wood thing on the top, but I didn't. No real excuse for that, I just wound up modelling it instead of learning how to normal map. And yes, the front part is very messy, partly because of Blender's overzealous creation of vertices during subdividing the surfaces, and largely because of my overzealous attempts to simplify the model after that modifier was applied.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by smooth groups. The reason that there's little smoothness is that I didn't want to deal with all the extra vertices that Blender makes with subsurface modifying, which was how we were taught to smooth. I spent hours cleaning it up after I applied the lowest setting.

As for the cartoony-ness, yes, I wanted it to look a bit like some guns I've seen in mangas, since the game I was making was going to be a stylized alternate reality depiction of WW2. This was sort of based on the Thompson. The primary problem I think you're talking about is that the barrel/muzzle are massive, and the muzzle is rather fluted at the end. Yeah, that was intentional. The weird thing on the rear sight is indeed weird, and I'm not entirely sure why it looks like that.

Again, thanks for the input. I was going to keep working on it over the summer, so it's ready to be used when I take Game Design again next year. Thankfully, it's going to be all 3D stuff, no dealing with trying to make Flash projects on Macs.

[Thaeris]

First, booleans can be very useful if you know what you're doing. I posted a very simple tutorial a while back, as seen here:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=74683.msg1476458#msg1476458

For precision work, I distrust automatic reducer functions. Do that by hand. Quads are also a good thing to model in for most purposes.

Next, I dislike the term "smooth groups." "Shading" or "lighting" is a more global term (eg "flat" or "smooth" shading), and I wish more programs strived to use standard terminology. For instance, you'd think "revolve" would be a universal operation function, yet Silo will call this "lathe." Lighting/shading of course affects how a polygon appears visually at any given angle, as well as how it appears in relation to adjacent polygons. I've never done much work with lighting in more full-featured programs such as Blender, so I can't relate to you how to modify your model's appearance in this regard, apart from tweaking the actual geometry itself. Keep in mind that lighting/shading is, with the exception of flat shading, closely related to how the geometry of the model itself lays.

[Cobra]

That gun model as a mesh really needs a lot of work and refinement before it can be considered well modeled.  The design itself, eeehh, not a fan.

It looks far from finished, mate. I don't even think he's finished with the basic design.

I'd recommend angling the grip about 45 degrees. That kind of grip is just plain uncomfortable, and you'd want to elongate the bolt some. Looks like you can barely hold it.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by smooth groups. The reason that there's little smoothness is that I didn't want to deal with all the extra vertices that Blender makes with subsurface modifying, which was how we were taught to smooth. I spent hours cleaning it up after I applied the lowest setting.

Is THAT how you were taught to smooth? Ugh. Tell your teacher he/she's a n00b. No, select the model, and look for a button "Set Smooth" in the Link and Materials panel (editing tab) in 2.49, or press the "Shading: Smooth" button on the left of the 3D view in 2.5. Then add an edgesplit modifier.

[Hades]

That gun model as a mesh really needs a lot of work and refinement before it can be considered well modeled.  The design itself, eeehh, not a fan.

It looks far from finished, mate. I don't even think he's finished with the basic design.

He's said it was finished, bro. Plus it's better to get criticism on stuff like this early on rather than later, it's harder to change the closer you are to finished.

[Titan]

The version I posted was the one I had to include in the final project. To be fair to the teacher, he was learning things at the same time we were. Then again, he couldn't have bothered to do it beforehand.

[AtomicClucker]

Biggest advice I have is to try some low-poly modeling first and use some quick orthos of the gun, as good reference makes model flow a lot easier.