Orion-Rose Cannon

After making a poll on twitter I started a new project in which I promised to make dope weapons since that was the winning vote and over the past 10+ days I have only been developing one weapon instead of what I wanted to do which was at least 3 although I did play around trying to make something else I quickly abandoned it for my main focus.

I do want to apologise that this project took so long since I took around 4 days off just to play games I... I still hate myself.

Just like my last project I wanted to make something that I had designed myself and I already had an idea of what I wanted to make. The idea came from a simple drawing that I drew years ago around about the same time as the Sci-Fi Doors which was of this rose looking particle beam/laser weapon which I later in 2018 decided that it was a weapon that a character/person could use if they attached it to there back and it goes over there shoulders.

The first thing to start making this model was create the butt end of the Core which at the time I thought I was just making the core but we will talk more about the Core later all you need to know is that I made this so i could have something to scale my rose off of.

Actually making this model was more complicated than it seemed mainly because I had no idea how to make the rose shape and the way I did it in the end was take a cylinder and use proportional editing to scale one end of the cylinder before cutting "V" shapes into the sides then I mirrored it which gave me the basic shape I was looking for and then To be honest I have no idea what I did to give it the amazing look it has now I looked at the save files and version 106 is still at the mirrored stage and version 107 is the cool looking shape so its a mystery to me but I'm glad it happened because compared to my drawing it looks way better in my opinion.

Once this miracle happened I stuck with that shape which I then spent hours adjusting I will spare you everything little thing I did but one of the main things I did to the rose was remove alot of Tris (Fixed on the left Unfixed on the right) the only ones to exist on the rose now are at the edges where it intersects with what I call the CORE of the cannon.

Even after getting the Rose right I was still tweaking it every 5 minutes but most of my time at this point was focused on the CORE which was actually the original cylinder that I proportionally scaled and just left there which I actually liked so I kept it and eventually joined it with the butt end of the core.

In my original terrible drawing there is no core or design for such a thing but I knew that if i start drawing or making new designs I would have to add it extra detail such as this in the modelling phase so I set about designing a core by Winging it.

I mean I started just adding in loop cuts and extruding left and right or should I say up and down then connecting faces to form bridges adding in bevels for rounded bridges I kinda just went nuts with the design and it ended up looking really nice.

I knew that the rose also looked a little plain so I decided to make it into panels and originally it had 8 panels going down (Right Side) but i decided that was too many so I merged them into 4 panels (Left Side)

The butt end of the Core went threw a major change in the end I scrapped the triangles for a bevel pattern and cut into the sides to make a design so it did not look so plain.

Once I had designed the model it was time to add basic materials to the main elements and since it looked like a rose I went with a red and black color scheme.

after adding basic materials I Tweeked them to look more metal and shiny before applying the color scheme to the sections I wanted while at the same time insetting and extruding to make the color scheme look a bit better (Use the slideshow)

Just for the sake of concept I took my weapon mesh and applied it to a circle curve to make a deathstar looking particle weapon just without the particle laser thing so I had to make that next

Making the laser seemed simple enough thanks to a handy tutorial I found on Youtube in which you use a wave modifier and some simple nodes such as noise texture and emission and by the looks of the images below it seems super easy and nice but you would be wrong.

Its not that making the beam was hard or that getting the beam to parent to the curve and array was difficult because that all went to plan but to get it to go where I want I had to apply all transforms which basically deactivated the wave modifier since I had to rotate the origin 90 degrees to get it to wave upwards which also moved the beams that where parented.

I solved this issue by complete luck while messing around with rotating the original object and its origin... i'm still not sure what i did but it works and it ended up here but since we don't see it in the render it don't matter where it ended up.

Once I had the beams in the right place and I was happy I started tweaking the lighting and look of the beams adding in some glare/fog glow and tweaking the contrast, hue and all that in the compositor once I was happy with everything I rendered out 6 images all at different sample counts they where in order 128, 256, 512, 1024, 3000 and 1500x2 Branched path.

Once I had made the still image of my cannon firing I wanted to make it into an animation but I want to stress that the animation was just for concept and I kinda half assed it.

The first video was the original concept its only 120 frames but it gets the point across I think

The second and third Videos are the final concept they both do the same thing but the third video fades the beam in and out to show it powering up and down the two videos look different because in the third video I merged the beam meshes together since each one had around 5-6 meshes each and I used a booleen to make them appear which I would have had to do for each mesh otherwise.

the reason the red glow on the ground and inside the rose is there in the third video is because I could not be bothered to remove them and to be honest I forgot.

As usually I have spare renders and images of my model so I will share them here at the end of the post :3

The first image was me trying to inset but it did a weird triangle thing because I did not turn off one of the settings and the second image I literally have 0 clue what happened I was just doing a simple hotkey and blender froze for a sec and that happened so no idea...

The third pic is the Red glow light to simulate the laser glow.