Concept
Modelling the gun
DAY 1 –
Today I started to model the basic shape of my gun using cubes and basic primitives, working on from them, adding detail as i went. Before modelling though, I imported my concept art as image planes to aid scale and have an easier reference to model from. I started off by making the main body of the gun using a basic cube ( roughly shaped like the gun), adding cuts and extruding out the grip and adding detail bit by bit. I used the same principles to model the scope (using a cylinder instead of a cube as a base object), the stock and the blade. To create the trigger guard I made a line straight through the model by selecting all the middle faces and “Edit Mesh > Connect” and clicked enter. Then I selected two vertices where the trigger was going to be, bevelled them, and extruded one of them towards the other, connecting the two with the bridge tool.
DAY 2 –
On day 2 I divided my model into shells and unwrapped the UVs. First of all, In Photoshop, I planned out how my gun would be broken down. I came to the conclusion that my model would be made out of 4 main UV shells: the main body (including the grip and trigger), the scope, the blade and the stock. One by one I unwrapped these shells into flat UVs, using cylindrical projection for the scope and planar projection for the rest of the gun. Finally I moved all the shells around to fit the canvas, which I then exported as a 2048×2048 UV snapshot.
DAY 3 –
On day 3, I painted the gun texture using Adobe Photoshop and applied it to the gun using Maya’s Hypershade.
I wanted my gun to look like something out of Overwatch, so I stuck to bright saturated colours. After I had my idea all drawn out in Photoshop, to add that extra depth and sense of realism, (on a new layer) I went over the gun with a big soft black brush covering all the lower areas of the gun. This gave my gun the illusion of global illumination.
To make the energy channels on the gun seem like they were bevelled into the actual weapon, I created a normal map and connected it to the normal texture node in the hypershade editor, giving it three dimensional detail.
Animating the gun
DAY 4 –
Today I animated my gun’s reload, primary firing and secondary firing animations in Maya. The first step was to draw out the skeleton / bone structure that my gun would have to make it easier to animate. I chose the grip as the parent and the trigger and stock as children splitting half way.
I chose this specific structure because for my animations it would be easier to rotate the whole gun (simulating recoil) since the grip is the parent, and to move the trigger and stock as children of the grip so that they would move accordingly with the gun, and not stay in place.
When animating I looked at a couple of guns from the game Overwatch for reference to the firing speed and recoil speed / amount. This made it easier to keyframe. The rest of the process was adding keyframes to the timeline (by pressing “s”) and moving them along by trial and error, getting the whole animation to play out smoothly.
When I was happy with the final result, I exported them as a .fbx animation
Implementing the gun in game
DAY 5 –
On Day 5 I implemented the gun into my game so it would replace the stock weapon in an Unreal Engine 4 BP.
I did this by importing the three animations and the main gun mesh into Unreal Engine (selecting the main mesh skeleton as reference when importing the animations), then, to replace the stock weapon with mine, I opened the FirstPersonCharacter BP and replaced the stock weapon mesh to my gun mesh and replacing this code in the event graph.
After re-positioning the gun in the viewport to a desired look, this was the final result.
Giacomo Verri 