Lightning gun

strobelite

Hi hi, I'm starting a new project designing and modeling a gun that shoots something other than bullets. I'm a fan of Dr. Grordbort's rayguns, so I'm using that as a point of inspiration to make my own gun that, in this case, generates lightning for awesome destruction purposes. Here's some of the reference:



And my concept:



I guess my goal is to create something that, even though I know next to nothing about guns, makes sense as a gun and could fit into that Grordbort style Let me know if you like the concept and I'll get to modeling soon!

theSixtyEight

I like your concept, but stock (or grip, or butt, whatever) looks very uncomfortable, you should stick to more classical look

strobelite

You know, the more I look at it, the more I agree, haha. Thanks, I will go back and make that part less stylized

strobelite

Update time! Here is the updated concept:



And here is the high poly:



Needs a bit more tweaking but I wanted to get some feedback :]

BARDLER

I really like everything on the gun except the end of the barrel... it looks to toyish, lol. Maybe try to rework it to barrel to fit the theme of the rest of the gun. Look at some guns from insomniacs games, or the lighting gun from Killzone, or the one from MGS2, and maybe some Tessella inspired art work to get some ideas.

strobelite

I really like those references! I need to work on the low poly soon but I will definitely see if I can change the barrel a bit if I have time. I'm not familiar with Tessella inspired art work, do you have any links?

Xelan101

@Bardler I think you mean Tesla not Tessella

And by that he means guns that shoot lightning, especially older "steampunk" style designs. You'll find a whole lot of Lightning guns use Tesla in the name because of his connections to electricity (Kevin's gun for example) Apparently he was actually attempting to create such a gun up until his death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R617vPlqinI"]Tesla gun - YouTube[/ame]

strobelite

Haha holy crap. I was looking at plasma globes but I didn't know Tesla was making a gun too.

RedRogueXIII

Your concept is pretty strong and reads well, a few suggestions:
- On the ribs of the bottom of the, change it to circular disk ribs and see how it affects the silhouette in fps view.
- For the trigger and trigger guard loop look into Winchester rifles large loops, seems a bit thin atm, and Winchesters are good refs for ornate engravings.
- Try to make the stock using a cylinder as a base shape instead of a cube, you have rounded edges not a round shape.
- I would lose that large blob thing on the back, it's out of place and isn't really detailed enough for being that close to the player. Take a look at Mauser C-96 refs or a revolver hammer and see if those make it more interesting.

almighty_gir

i'm interested in how you're going to do the plasma ball :P

strobelite

almighty_gir: I am too, got any ideas? Haha.

ambershee

I wouldn't model it.

Model the outer sphere, which will simply be a glass style shader, and model the stand for the inner sphere. The rest would be handled with a particle system within the appropriate game engine.

mbosiczky

Cool work.

strobelite

Yay updates, finally. Thanks to everyone for your feedback-- I did try to make the front of the barrel a bit smaller and thicken the trigger guard. This is due in a couple days so I didn't feel comfortable changing big parts of the concept but I would like to revisit it over the summer so I appreciate the critiques.

So here's the low poly:





And with normals and ao:

KSMO

looks good, looks like the bake came out pretty well. Next time consider softening up the edges of your high poly. the normals on the base of the barrel and the front most hand grip could be a little stronger.

i really like the design tho. I'm wondering how you will handle the glass bubble. Is there geometry inside the bubble?? something that we will see when the transparent material is applied to it?

strobelite

Hey Kyle, thanks for the feedback, especially about the normals. I think you are definitely right about the weaker places of the normals, one day I will get as awesome normals as you can get :P There is some basic geometry inside the globe and I think I'm going to take it into UDK to do the glass texture.

Also! First pass texture render from max:

strobelite

Got it in UDK

KevinDuong

Great job, I love how this turned out. I'd like to see some sort of coil filament wrapping around the rod in your globe. would add that final bit of silhouette that sells that it is either a light bulb / something electricity related. other than that, everything else turned out bad ass. Very strong silhouette overall!