Virtual Environments Blog: And now for something completely different…

On occasions working non-stop on the same project can become a little draining and monotonous, this is why often when working on ventures I like to change things up and do other smaller ideas to refresh and even learn something new.

During this project another design opportunity sprang up, a friend was about to do a live stream session for a group of people and it felt appropriate for them to possess a unique intro to the stream. This intro was for the benefit of viewers as well giving indication to them that something was about to start, allowing them to settle and inspiring intrigue within them.

Knowing the topics and subjects the person desiring the intro liked made design quite easy, I chose to revolve it around the symbol he frequently utilises and on Warhammer 40K, a franchise he enjoys. This concluded with an intro that had a Bolt Pistol, from Warhammer 40K, firing a bolt that put forth the symbol. The key challenges were the construction of the Bolt Pistol and precisely how to get a suitable fiery effect to retain on screen in the shape of the symbol.

The Bolt pistol, although moderately time consuming, didn’t really introduce anything new to me, as it was primarily the standard modelling using a box to start with and then introducing vertices and connections in order to shape the parts to match the reference plates I had within 3DS Max.

The fiery symbol was where I really learnt something, as I had a reason to now delve further into particle systems, primarily the PArray. To begin with I created a spline for the Bolt to follow; a simple path constraint animation meant the Bolt followed the symbols path nicely. The next step was to introduce fire, the general material settings and particle shape were the same as the fire tutorial and Tornado effects previously explored, except adjusted to become a dark purple colour. The next part saw me use a PArray with the setting ‘Use selected sub-object’ which meant that the particles would eject from a specific plane that had been selected, this enabled me to have the fire just spraying from the rear of the object.

The problem I now faced was that the fire would follow the bullet, but spray off in the direction of travel after having been thrown out. This meant the symbol wouldn’t be seen as the particles didn’t settle. After multiple attempts at adjusting statistics I discovered that by reducing the speed to 0 and, more importantly, the motion inheritance to 0 the particles now were sprayed out and would stay in place on the symbol. With the appropriate life span settings this meant that I now had the fiery symbol I wanted. The next issue was that the fire was quite static and a little boring. To solve this I increased the spin value which gave it more of a roiling flame appearance.

Finally I did experiment with glow; unfortunately this glow didn’t seem to ever work out well. The main issue seemed to be with it being square, each particle shone a square glow and when you multiply that by the volume of particles required to form the symbol, it really proved ugly with this massive square glow behind it. This led to the conclusion that the glow would need to be left as no amount of statistic fiddling encouraged a nicer looking glow.

With the Bolt Pistol in place the fire and Bolt travelling nicely I added some final touches. I included a Bolt shell being ejected from the guns ejection port, I added an explosion via an atmospheric apparatus which expanded as the Bolt was fired and included some motion blur upon the bullet. Motion blur was an effect that took me by surprise as it was very simple and merely a case of going into object properties and turning it on, the value set determines how much blur but it really was astoundingly simple to get a very nice looking added effect. As a note for future endeavours I feel I could have likely re-rendered with an increased Motion Blur value.

With the 3D animation finished some extra images were placed on planes to act as reason for the Bolt ricocheting and the camera motion was created following the bullet, then revealing the symbol. A few extra bits of text were added via Premiere and the music and sound effects were included to finish the piece off nicely.

As is my way, I saved multiple versions of the file for the Bolt Pistol; this act did begin to spawn the notion of a change log. I had not considered it before but a record of what changes between file versions would prove useful in finding anything that needs to be bought back due to inadvertent ruination. It strikes me as something that would be good in both a personal project and business project setting.

The Final Version of the intro:

The starting point of many a 3D project...a blank work space with only reference plates...

Once that first box goes in though there is no stopping the modeling and extrusions aplenty.

Simply shaping each section by adding new edge, vertices etc leads to any shape required

To get the hole in the side of the barrel I used Boolean this I have found risky so I actually copied the barrel to make sure I always had a spare

There was always the notion in the back of my mind about having the clip eject, thus I made it a separate piece in case I did have it drop from the gun

Adding vertices and shifting them along edges was a lot easier than trying to cut the line into it, especially when dealing with curves

Some parts were only really visible on the side view and thus were accurate to that but the front proved ambiguous but it looked good even through that.

These were smoothed via mesh-smooth, something I may strive to avoid in the future, but I can't deny they do look good, and in small quantities it won't be too bad...

...ok so in medium quantities it will be fine...

...Ok so copied over the entire gun as rivets to hold it together...please be fine...

Interestingly it did seem fine with it, I guess with only the one object having this amount of mesh-smoothed objects is within the program's ability to handle.

This handle was perhaps a little lazily done, it was extruded from the top and then just put inside the lower side, I potentially should have cut out an opening in the lower side and connected the two officially.

The handle was two separate objects the squashed sphere at the bottom and the main piece manipulated from box then extruded in the appropriate directions

The completed handle was carefully positioned next to the main trigger with each point being adjusted to just touch the main gun so as to look like they were attached

The trigger was pink...honestly that was the most exciting thing to say about it...I designed it so it could actually be pulled by going inside the main gun.

These grip sections were incredibly difficult to model but the result was certainly worthwhile

The side of the gun matched up perfectly with the reference plate which was immeasurably pleasing.

Certain details on each side were the same but certain others weren't this excluded the ability to use symmetry thus being able to see both sides at once proved invaluable via the x-ray mode.