 So you want to go from low to mid poly, not a problem. Today we are going to make a minigun, a.k.a. a gatlin or a chain gun, because the second most beautiful thing in the world is showering your enemy in a cloud of bullets. So here we go. Mid poly is a delicate dance. On one hand you don't want everything to look like boxes, but on the other you still want to keep the poly count as low as possible. So how do you know when you've gone too far? Well, basically all you need to know is your maximum poly count. Usually it's the programmer's job to tell you what this number is, but if you are a solo game dev like I was, it really just depends on your game. Like in my game I wanted to have massive 30 on 30 dogfights, but my computer at the time, which was a Surface Pro 2, could only handle about 40 enemies on the screen at a time, and when I amplified their AI to include things like flight tactics, maneuvers, and formations between wing leaders and wing men, that number dropped to 30, assuming that each enemy was only 400 polygons. So 400 polygons was the limit for each enemy aircraft. Your maximum poly count will obviously be different, but just keep all that in mind when you are looking for your limits. Now once you know your poly count limit, that's when we can start modeling. Here you can see that I've already created the low poly version of our weapon. If you want to know how to do low poly you can check out the last video. Right now it's 420 faces, but let's just say we had a limit of 1,000 faces, which gives us 600 extra faces to play with. What should we do? Well a lot of beginners will make the mistake of hammering everything with a bevel. It is an easy way to make everything look better, but here's why you should be a little careful. This is a cube. Cubes are the foundation of low poly, because you can stretch and shape them into just about any basic shape. It's a nice quad, and it only has 6 faces. Now if you add a level 1 bevel modifier, the cube instantly jumps from 6 faces to 26 faces. And if you use 2 segments like most people, then this box is going to cost you 54 faces. We literally non-oupled our number of faces, and it's still just a box. So you are going to run out of poly real fast if you just hammer everything with the bevel. Personally I just recommend bevel in one segment, and just shade the object smooth for a clean look. Now the smart way to increase poly count is to be selective. You as the modeler should anticipate what part of the model the viewer is most likely to pay attention to. This is a pretty common practice, and is the reason why things like the toes and feet have significantly less poly than things like the face, chest and legs. The most hilarious professional example of this is the 2B model from Neer, where the 3D model is a pretty normal model, with the normal high poly count of about 50,000 faces. And then you get to her ass, which under certain special circumstances the developer knew might be the first thing the player sees, and stacked it with 300,000 faces. Yes, that's right. Her ass has more poly than some entire games, but it looked great. And everyone loved the game so you decide where you think most of the poly needs to go. Personally I think the most important part of this weapon is the barrel. That is the part that everyone recognizes, so my first priority is going to be to transform these low poly hexagons to a proper round shape. I think a normal 32 sided cylinder should be fine, but I'd like to make the shading here a little smooth, while keeping the ends flat. So if we tab to edit mode, select these faces, right click, shade smooth, you will now see that nice smooth shading. Now I'm just going to duplicate this object for each main part, but for the barrel I'm going to show you a trick, which I learned from my little bro. In the time you want to create a circular pattern of a repeating object, make the first object, in our case the main barrel. And once you're done, press A and move all the points slightly off center. Tab back to object mode, then shift A, create an empty plane in the exact same position as the barrel's origin, select them both, rotate and size them however you want, then control A and apply all transformations. Then click the barrel and add an array modifier. Decide how many barrels you want, uncheck relative offset, check object offset, and set the target to your empty plane, and now all you got to do is rotate the empty. To get a perfect circle, divide 360 by the count. So if I wanted six barrels, 360 divided by six is 60, but I want eight barrels. So 360 divided by eight is 45. So I'm going to go to the front view, press R, type 45, enter, and you're done. Now on, if you want to change anything about the barrel, you just edit the main barrel, and the clones will automatically adjust themselves. So to sum everything up, try to make the round things round first. If you have any leftover poly, simple bevels are a nice touch, but focus the poly on where you expect people to pay the most attention. Hope that helps. If you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to ring that bell. Otherwise, you'll never know when I upload new stuff. Hope you have a fantastic day, and I'll see you around.