Finishing the handgrip

Right now, our handgrip (or handle) looks fairly plain. Let's work on this for a while, and see if we can get a better look at it.

The first thing we'll do is select the large face at the side of the handgrip:

We'll duplicate this by pressing Shift + D and move it back a bit:

To add a little more detail, let's run a couple of loop cuts across this face by pressing Ctrl + R + wheel up (rolling the mouse wheel changes the number of edge loops):

Then, we can drag the lower section back a bit by selecting the bottom-right edge and moving it to the Y axis:

Next, let's run another edge loop vertically so that we can start forming the shape of the cut-out (for the grip):

We'll delete these unneeded faces. Next, let's grab this front edge and pull it forward:

Then, we'll extrude everything across the whole plane to get the basic shape. Before going further, you'll want to remove the faces inside of the mesh (right where the two have joined at the mirror modifier). We don't want any faces inside of our mesh as it will affect shading later on.

Let's Bevel this corner edge at the bottom to get a more rounded shape:

Next, we'll Bevel these edges here as well for a softer transition:

Next, we'll Bevel the corner edges so they're nice and smooth:

We can get rid of the Faces on the extreme bottom here as well:

Next, let's run a hard (single) bevel along the edge that connects to the handgrip and mark it as sharp for the Edge Split modifier to work:

This looking pretty good; one problem we have here is that our earlier beveling has left a single vertex in the middle of the handle. If the back of the handle were hard (sharp), this wouldn't be a problem; because it's curved, it will affect the shading. I've added a temporary material and a rendering setup just to demonstrate what the problem will be here:

As you can see, the shading in the image is distorted. This is what can happen when you have a single vertex in the middle of a smooth (curved) surface. We don't want the vertex here, so let's fix it.

First, we'll just delete the vertex itself, which will eliminate the surrounding faces:

Then, we'll run a loop cut across the back of the handle:

Next, we'll fill in some geometry:

This will take care of our shading problem.

Next, let's run a few loop cuts along the pistol grip itself:

We can bevel these a little, rolling the mouse wheel as we do so to create a series of faces:

Next, we'll want to bring these middle edge loops a little bit inside. The easiest way to do this is to scale along the face normals. This is accomplished by pressing Alt + S and scaling them in.

Now, we can bevel the edges a bit more to round things off:

This looks pretty good.

Next, let's just duplicate an existing face with Shift + D.

We can move and extrude it up to create a base for our pistol grip. This will just add a little more detail to the area where it meets the main body of the gun:

We'll bevel it until we get a nice shape using the same techniques that we've already used:

Then, we can duplicate this section (or just the bottom face if you'd prefer) and move it down to the base of the handle:

We can detail this area a bit using techniques that we've already covered.

At least for now, this is pretty good for the handle. We'll add a bit more detail later, but now, it's time to move onto the main body of the gun.