[WIP] Non-Violent weapon

initial designs

First non-violent weapon task when reading the brief I already had a couple of ideas my own, the first idea was to do with music. since I love music, I could take different elements of instruments and create musical Warfare. In my initial design, It was pretty simple, the gun would have a trombone as a barrel which I thought was quite comical and the frame would be made out of wood. The usage and ability of a weapon were kind inspired by Saints Row 4 with the dubstep gun. It just seems to be a very fun weapon, knowing the requirement that it has to be non-violent my design repelled people.

incredibly bad random sketches i made during a lesson

the color pallet I had in mind, was warmer colors like browns and brass.

then I tried another idea which would be my final idea, a sort of water gun that fires globs of sticky gel, which upon impact with the target, coats them in a purple gel, within seconds, the slime hardens in contact with oxygen, and the target becomes incredibly bouncy, turning into them into a makeshift bouncing ball. my main inspirations were Splatoon for the designs and portal for the gel idea. i was very fascinated with Splatoon's water gun-Esque weapon designs, i wanted to make something that would fit the game's vibrant aesthetic. the image below were what I was thinking of when it came to this design

                                                
                                                                                                                                                                      

So to start off with my model I blocked out a simple design that's similar to my concept art I decided to use a subdivision surface and subdivide my model which gave it a more rounded look. Using inset faces I could smooth out some of the artifacts that were produced from the subdivision surface modifier also used inset faces on the barrel end which I didn't inwards which produced the barrel Experimenting a bit more with the model I got something that I liked and fit my Concepts are so I applied my modifier.

I was trying to replicate the shape of a gun similar to the ones you would see inside of splatoon and splatoon 2 as I believe they would be my best sources of reference. i then modeeled the handle and slime tank, following the same principles as the frame. using subdivision surtface to get the desired effect.

The next thing I wanted to try was piping. before doing this project, I wanted to incorporate piping or some sort of pipe that connects to my weapon. I believed I should give myself the challenge to add something unique and I believe it paid off well, especially having to sing my final design. To start off with the pipe, I pressed shift A, I selected Curve, and then the path. on the right side in the data properties, I went to geometry and made the pipe 3D using Bevel.  As seen in the picture below, this created a round cylindrical shape.

the thing that makes curves unique, is that they are simply verts that can be edited in edit mode as seen in the picture below to create all sorts of different pipes. Then, I went to object -> convert -> mesh, which converts the pipe into a mesh. it gets treated like a mesh, and you can unwrap it and apply textures to it.

When I finished my model, it was time to attempt uv unwrapping.  It went pretty well, applying seams where I wanted them. I attempted tricks I found out from youtube for the piping; Follow active quads. Essentially, The Follow Active Quads tool takes the selected faces and lays them out by following continuous face loops, even if the mesh face is irregularly-shaped. This makes the horrible piping uv look nice and clean. To prepare a blender for substance, I select the parts I want to paint. and create materials for them. substance separates the material sets, so each part can be painted without it being a pain. I then exported my model as an .fbx file. using substances polygon fill, i picked solid colours and dragged colour over my model. This paints the model and gives it colour. After sorting out the colour and materials for my model, I exported all necessary textures. with these textures i plugged them in into the necessary meshes. using blenders built in shader editor, i tweaked some settings making the textures work better. although, there was one more texture i had left, which was the glass for the slime tank. using photoshop, i used a texture named alpha. alpha maps are a texture map to declare what parts of a texture are transparent, black being clear to white being opaque. i went with a grey sort of colour. the glass i wanted didnt want to be unable to look into, but not invisible either. with tweaking i got desired results

All in all, I enjoyed the project. The brief allowed me to use my brain more, as creating a gun that doesn't kill and that is non-lethal allows more creativity. What I liked about this project is that I actually generated a finished product, and liked it too. i also believe showed a better understanding of blender. problems i had with the door project i fixed with this project. UV unwrapping was more tolerable this time round. my model was optimized and had no artefacts that i'm aware of. I attempted to add more detail. The incorporation of substance painter also helped greatly, making texturing easier than previous projects. However, there are more things I'd like to try in the future. I would like to use more different types of textures, like height maps and normal textures, allowing for more detail. I would also like to try models that are more high poly and detailed; the model I made doesn't have many polygons.(4.8k) so i could try making something more high poly