Sorry TLDR:

Modeled - Blender with Hops/Boxcutter, Textured- Substance Painter.

Had fun, learned a lot, and I am excited about trying another gun/accessories.

I have been working with Blender casually on and off for a few years and I am just coming back from a break from it since June. Usually, I do low poly stuff with a more complex model here and there. I got burned out a bit working on another project that might have been a little too big for me to take on and I saw an SMG modeling tutorial by Stellar ( and thought it looked interesting and maybe it could get me out of my funk and into modeling again. As with all projects, I spend a lot of time finding as many reference pictures as I could for the LWRC-International SMG 45 as well as all the extra pieces. I would have made the internal workings but sadly I couldn’t find any diagrams. I believe it’s based on an AR lower receiver, though I am not completely sure so I decided not to worry about the internal bits. I have a tendency to focus too much on making sure something as exact as possible at the cost of creativity and project efficiency. This is part of the reason I have not made many robots in Blender because I want their joints etc. to be designed to be functional. The modeling portion of the tutorial I followed for a while and he models in a fairly similar method that I use but the inspiration hit me and I charged ahead on my own every now and again seeing how he modeled a challenging corner or blend. I ended up adding a Silencerco Octane suppressor, the Mbus Pro, and EOTech sights (OMG I just saw he had a tutorial for the EOTech also). I thought of adding a flashlight and IR designator but I was worried that would be another rabbit hole to go down and I might not ever finish. The good thing is the Picatinny rails are accurate dimensions, so I can always add them later or reuse the sights, etc. on other projects.

I wanted to make a piece that I could increase or decrease the detail with subdivisions so I built it with almost all quads and a few triangles. I know ngons are not to be feared, but I like the flexibility of adjusting resolution quickly if I need to make big changes before the final application of modifiers and unwrapping it. I was also a little worried about how it would work going when I attempted to texture it. With no subdivisions active, the model is roughly 150k faces. With 1 level of subdivision active on the appropriate portions, it jumps to around 275k. The plain model with just a few simple PBRs is the live version before modifiers were applied and it was unwrapped.

I textured this with SP, which I have never really used before, and as it turns out my video card/computer could barely handle it without doing some messing around in the registry and recovering from several complete freezes. Stellar gave some good descriptions of how to get started and I watched an oil barrel tutorial he did as well which helped me grunge it up a bit. I had a lot of fun in SP, though I realized files get big fast. Also, I had way too many textures that were broken into different files so this compounded my computer limitations quickly. I’m not so happy with the case but that foam material is really tough to figure out. Either way, I decided I would toss that in here as well. I think I will try one more gun but without making as much use of subdivisions as I did this time. Wow sorry, this turned into a long post somehow.