A project overview

For our first project, we'll be modeling a high poly, sci-fi weapon. It's approximately the same shape as a modern day handgun, but it gives us the flexibility to be creative and explore different modeling techniques.

Here's an example of what the final model will look like (without materials and textures):

In this first chapter, we'll create the basic beveled shapes of our gun. We'll start by extruding some basic shapes. Next, we'll add the main body of the gun, then move on to the additional pieces. As we do this, we'll look at a number of modifiers and mesh tools. Specifically, we'll be discussing the following topics:

• Extrusion
• Face Normals
• Tris, Quads, and N-Gons
• Smooth versus flat shading
• The Mirror Modifier
• The Edge Split Modifier
• The knife tool
• The bevel tool

When we're finished with this section, our project will look like this:

If you're ready, let's open a new scene in Blender and get started!