"Realistic" Necron Gun Design

This is a personal project that I made during a CG Spectrum alumni mentorship with Shaun Stephenson. Shaun Stephenson is an absolutely amazing mentor who helped me with art direction feedback during this project. I have not done a ton of hard surface modeling and he was a huge help throughout the entire process.

You can find a link to Shaun's portfolio below:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1843111/

I wanted to try to create an original gun concept that felt like it could have been used by the Necrons from Warhammer 40k. At the same time I wanted to reimagine the gun to be more realistic and to lean into some other sci-fi elements. I didn't want it to just scream Necron from Warhammer 40k but I did want to add subtle nuances throughout the piece such as decals, color choices, etc.

This project was modeled in Autodesk Maya, textured in Substance 3D Painter and rendered in Unreal Engine 5.4. The emissive VFX for the glass chambers and barrel were made via UE5 materials and utilized panning textures. For this project I decided to try my hand at using Virtual Textures, Virtual Shadow maps, UDIM tile workflows, Blueprints, raytracing, nanite and Lumen. All materials used on this project with exception the screen material were created from scratch. I was aiming at a more high end cinematic level of quality rather than an asset that would be used in game. I went ahead and reduced it in engine down to 143k polygons via the nanite settings tab. This would allow it to be used in game but additional measures would have to be taken to reduce size on disc. The texture resolution can be adjusted in engine easy enough as well.

The screen material used on the side of the gun is an edited version of a material that Dekogon Studios created for an arcade machine asset pack that I own. You can find a link to Dekogon Studios portfolio below:

https://www.artstation.com/dekogon

I attempted to use Midjourney at the start of the project to get the creative juices flowing reference image wise but ultimately I felt like it just made more work for me in the long run. Most of the parts, details and proportions really didn't make sense once I went to try to translate it to 3D.
I was able to scrap some pieces and shape language from the image that I finally landed on after spending hours tweaking prompts and editing images. I ended up having to go through a ton of iterations prior to landing on this design but I definitely was able to draw inspiration from the generated image and other reference material. Many design choices were made on the fly via trial and error.

The interior of the barrel of the gun was heavily influenced by various CERN physics experiments.

I would like to give a special thanks to Doug Adair (Polygeddon) for helping me figure out how to use blueprints and sequencer to get my moving parts up and running. You can find a link to his portfolio below:

https://www.artstation.com/polygeddon

I would also like to give thanks to both Carl Shedd and Christopher Flynn for answering various artistic feedback questions via discord periodically when ever I started to get tunnel vision while working. It is always a huge help to get other eyes on a long term project while working.

You can find links to their portfolios below as well:

https://www.artstation.com/carlshedd
https://www.artstation.com/cflynn8081

Overall I had a blast working on the project and the level of artistic freedom I experienced while working on it was quite refreshing!