GUNSMITH WORKBENCH
Personal Concept excluding Pistol by Kris Thaler
This was a piece I did as part of my final Demo Reel. After creating the guns for my Props and Weapons for Games class, I was told that if I do intend to present myself as an environment artist alongside a prop artist, it might be a good idea to put the aforementioned props into actual Unreal environments. And so I did. I decided to create a futuristic gunsmith workbench by getting inspirations from various Sci-Fi games, such as Star Citizen and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.
With 3D printing becoming more commonplace and many futuristic concepts starting to include it as an idea for firearms, I figured it would be huge missed opportunity to not include a 3D printer in my scene. And thus I created from scratch a printer based on the Lulzbot series, albeit with the name changed for copyright reasons.
I had a lot of fun coming up with futuristic iterations of existing tools such as a digital torque screwdriver and Vernier Calipers as well as my own Brand X stand-ins such as the gun lubricant and the crate bearing the logo of a alternate reality counterpart to the real world firearm manufacturer Heckler & Koch.
FLYBY
BREAKDOWN
Workbench UI
For this piece I wanted to go for something that's futuristic but nothing too crazy and out of the realm of possibility, so nothing like those projected holograms in Star Wars, instead I thought it would be nice to have a UI right on the surface of the workbench that can detect what firearm is placed on it and can provide several options, like showing the condition of the gun, step-by-step instructions for disassembly and so on. Due to the latter feature, gun components like the firing pin and slide also are highlighted on the UI. Additionally, I decided to give the workbench a glowing hexagon pattern that moves along the length of the bench like a wave. This was done by exporting the hexagon mask from 3D Painter to determine where the glow can show up, and then multiplying it with a white bars that are blurred that're then put in a panner node to move it along the UVs. The UI also has a weather app that shows the forecast for the upcoming week, so I created a bunch of icons and have them in a panner node as well to move them, and those are multiplied by a rectangular mask to contain it to the top right of the UI. Once all the elements are accounted for, they are then stacked together with Add nodes.
Workbench UI Material Graph
Workbench UI and Hexagon glow in-game
Props and their Processes
Good props can only be made with good references, which meant I had to scour all over Google Images, Bing and Flickr, to look for good references to what I'm building. A good number of the props are based off real life ones, tweaked for either copyright purposes or to futurize it more. Probably the most obvious real-life object I recreated was the Lulzbot 3D Printer, which I renamed the Sefirot Crown for copyright reasons. Thankfully for me, the Lulzbot site had very detailed images for assembling the printer and had dimensions listed out for components so that I can get the proportions of the printer right. I also needed to get some inspiration for the environmental layout and design of the room the workbench was in, so I looked up various concepts on Pinterest and Artstation, mainly from science-fiction works like Star Citizen, the futuristic Call of Duty games and others to give me an idea of what such an environment would look like.
The Printer
Arguably one of the more eye-catching props would be the aforementioned 3D Printer, I had this modeled out based on the information given by the Lulzbot site and then textured it in 3D Painter, I then added a skeletal system to give it the animation. I had a root joint that connects to 2 joint chains that are controlled with IK handles, as well as 2 other joint chains. The former controlled the movement of the wiring and the spool's material. The latter controlled both the printing base's movement as well as the rotation of the spool.
Printer Skeletal Sytem(Left) and Printer In-game(Right)
Props and Modular Pieces Laid Out
