Weapon Design

If you have seen my portfolio then you will know that I like modelling guns, so I felt right at home with this part and got through it relatively quickly. Hadron's right arm is a thermo-electric railgun that discharges a large electrical beam that is deadly to enemy equipment and lethal to living things (Fig.08).


The right arm is a multipurpose weapon more suited for short range offense. It has a large degree of movement and contains an ion cannon and two smaller, silenced chainguns for removing soldiers and small vehicles.

Hadron's last remaining attack weapon is six surface to air/land cruise missilesmounted under the tightly armoured back frame. I had to plan this part very carefully as getting the rockets to fit was difficult (Fig.09).

Neck

The neck did not need a huge amount of freedom to move due to the swivelling hips, however I incorporated some basic movement and support so it could make small adjustments, as seen in Fig.10 – Fig.12.

Topology

For the detail I wanted to add, I knew I could not keep the topology perfectly clean. I did my best though, optimizing where I could and Fig.13 shows some screenshots of Hadron's wireframe.

Lighting/Shaders

Due to time constraints, I had very little time to create the lighting and shader setup. I used V-Ray as my renderer of choice and the setup was very simple: a single V-Ray light and a V-Ray sun light to create the hotspot reflections. I also had a V-Ray HDR in the reflection and illumination slots, which I got from www.hdrimaps.com

For the V-Ray settings, I used an Irradiance map and light cache with fairly default settings. There was nothing special about the raw render. I composited the file in Photoshop, adding glow effects, retouching, bad reflections and things like that. The background, and smoke are 2D effects, which a friend of mine helped me with afterwards. (Thanks man!) (Fig.14).