32-pounder Blomefield gun with wooden carriage

My Journey Building the 32-Pounder Blomefield Gun in 3D

As a beginner 3D artist, I set out to recreate the 32-pounder Blomefield cannon, inspired by a highly detailed wooden model by Signet on the Ships of Scale forum (link). His step-by-step photos gave me a solid reference and motivated me to rebuild the cannon from top to bottom.

I started by creating the high-poly model (418,312 tris), which was both challenging and rewarding. The next step, optimizing it to a 4,000-triangle low-poly version, was the hardest part. Every reduction felt like it ruined the silhouette, but I eventually reached the target, which gave me a huge confidence boost.

After UV unwrapping, I baked the high-poly details onto the low-poly mesh in Substance Painter, which went better than expected. Texturing was tricky at first, especially isolating effects between iron and wood, but I resolved it using masking techniques.

Rendering in Substance Painter looked great, but exporting to Sketchfab was difficult. Lighting and material behavior changed, and finding a balance, especially between wood glossiness and metal definition, took a lot of tries.

Despite the challenges, this project taught me a lot about modeling, optimization, texturing, and real-time rendering, and I’m proud of what I created.