3d Bullets Part - 1

First up, the key for every successful model lies in the details, which requires good references. I took the following 2 photographs to use as reference for this project.

Modeling:

    Open the material library, choose an empty slot, and add a bitmap map to the diffuse slot. Choose the side image of the bullets. Create a plane with a 4 x 3 ratio and drag the material onto it. Click on the "Hungarian Cube" icon in the material editor ("Show map in viewport").

Modelling the Shell:
Use Line (Create > Splines > Line) to create a half silhouette of the shell.

Notice that the lines in the Rim part aren't straight. I used Bezier-Corner.

Add a Lathe modifier. You'll need to move the Axis (in my case, the Y-axis) in order to fit the Lathing to the width of the bullet.

Add a smooth modifier. Enable the Auto smooth option and increase the threshold spinner a little.

Modeling the Projectile:
Draw another line and change the smoothing options to bezier-corner where needed.

Add Lathe and smooth modifiers and align the projectile lathing with the shell (you can copy and paste the lathe modifier from the shell).

The bullet modeling is now finished

Mapping:
Add a UVW Mapping modifier. Change the projection to Cylinder, enable "Cap" and change the Alignment to fit the length of the shell.

To check our mapping so far, add a Checker map (with high tiling settings (let's say 20 each)) and add it to the model. We can see that in the Casing part of the model, the squares are more rectangular and the Rim squares are much smaller:

Play with the mapping settings (length, width and height) in order to have 'all square – equal sized' squares.

Now this next part is bit tricky (and not so detailed)…

Add a UVW Unwrap modifier. Click the Edit button. You can see that the Casing and the Rim mappings are overlapping. Choose the Face sub-selection, uncheck Ignore Backfacing and select all the Rim polygons. In the Edit window, move them to an unoccupied place. Select all polygons and scale it down so all polygons fit the blue box margins. Still in the Edit window, choose Tools > Render UVW template. I chose 2048 x 2048 resolution (try staying in 2n power values) and hit Render UV template. Save the render; we will use it later to texture.

Use the same technique for the projectile. This time, I rendered the UVs on 1024 x 1024.

Texturing:
    Open the texported Shell UVs in Photoshop. Double-click the locked layer (Background) to unlock it. Press Ctrl + I to invert the colours. Double-click again on the layer and move the right blending spinner to delete the white colour from it. From this moment on, this will always be the utmost layer.

We will now use some metal textures I found in a simple Google search, here

Add the 3 metal images as layers in the order they appear here.

Select the second metal layer and change its Layer Style to Hard Light. Select the third metal layer and change its Layer Style to Soft Light. Hide the Texport UVs layer and select Layer > Merge Visible (you need to highlight one of the visible layers in order to choose Merge Visible). Unhide the Texport UVs layer and scale up the merged layer so it fit the Casing part of the UVs

Duplicate the layer and move it up so it also covers the Rim UVs. Use the Delete brush and delete the part of the copied layer that overlaps the Casing UVs. Merge both layers down. In order to reduce the file size, delete all the unused texture (meaning where it's not overlapping with the Casing and the Rim UVs)

Go to Part. 2