3D Modeling of a Kar 98k

What is the project and why we made it

This is a Kar 98k 3D model I made with a friend from about November 2017 to August 2018. We wanted to model something that would look cool and that we could integrate in a game with the Unity 3D engine, and learn in the process of creating the model. So, with almost no knowledge about modeling, texturing and animating, we started to create the Kar 98k.

How we managed to do it

As is said earlier, we knew nothing about the process of creating a 3D model - well almost nothing, we knew how to create rough shapes in Blender. So we learned.

We watched dozens of tutorials on YouTube, created something, admitted it was ugly and started again. Again and again and again. We would see each other every Friday after school to advance the project, and we would call on Discord and share our screen, slowly showing the progress we would have made. And slowly, it started to look like the thing we imagined. It was amazing.The Kar model after months of work (we added the scope afterwards) - June 20th 2018

In April, we started to think about the texturing. We decided to use the free version of Substance Painter to texture it, so I downloaded the software and for the second time we jumped into that learning loop. It was a bit faster than the modeling, even though it took us time to understand how things were working and to come with textures we liked.The Kar texture from June 24th 2018

After the modeling and the texturing, we thought it would be cool to had more life to the model, so we started to learn about animating the model. This is a part we really struggled to make due to the complexity of it. Furthermore, we needed to tweak a lot the model, like separate multiple parts of the model in order to animate it.