Making Jeanne's Guns - All 4 One (AAA asset production - winter assessment) (Part1)

Following on from my introduction to my asset production assignment, These entries will cover the making of my model based on Jeanne's guns from Bayonetta 2. 

So my starting thought for this model was that i at least wanted to get the shape of model done fairly quickly so at least had a frame of reference for how far i was through.

I began quad drawing parts of the model, the magazine/handle, the stock, the barrel and so forth, trying to make sure that the quad draw followed the topography of the object and that i would be able to then extrude faces to make other elements in the design e.g. the plating on the handle being extruded from faces on the grip.

For the moment on here I've just elected to follow the outlying shape of the magazine, the shape for this is a nightmare with all the odd protrusions.

The stock is somewhat more easy, with it being more block like in it's shape.

The barrel seems to be the easiest as this is largely just a block with grooves on it, with additional loops to make room for the groove in the middle of the barrel

Okay, somewhat of a disclaimer here; at this point i had a fair amount of stuff just quad drawn as flat planes, and i was having a real struggle with visualising the elements in a 3-D space, especially when considering how i would need to add elements to the model for the more polished touches. So against my better judgement, my next step were making use of the pre-set objects in Maya, and then manipulating them for parts of the object (especially where circles are involved). This was in hope of having more success of creating the model.

So on to the whole, using objects to create elements, i decided to start small with the fingerpiece, or the handguard for the gun, starting with a cylinder, extruding out and deleting the center faces (instead of using the pipe tool as i now have realised in retrospect) 

I extruded out some faces and molded them to be the shape of the hook on the ring piece, this decision seems to be better because it's easier to visualise if i'm doing something that looks off.

Extruding more faces to begin the actual guard strip, I'm taking great care to make sure the shape is good and the topology is good, as i would rather not have to revisit this bit later.

This piece appear to be complete, although where the cutoff point is on the model is up for debate because the reference image is slightly unclear.

So for the moment this is part 1 over, I'll likely be continuing to use a mixture of quad drawing and using pre set shapes for a nice 3D foundation, and hopefully by breaking down the object into multiple elements should allow me to better make my way through this model.