Ion Fury development process

As ever, a good project needs a good brainstorm, so I spent a few good hours of sketching out various ideas, with pages and pages of roughs and concept sketches.

Yup, this took a few hours to visualise before I started building it.

Imported my final sketch into Blender and began to work on it from there.

Note how at this time, the firebox wasn't added to the front grip.

Towards the final stages of modelling, I really wanted to make it look like it was an original product of the game and feature the signature skull logo (like the shotgun and bowling bombs) so I decided to make it in 3D instead of a 2D decal/texture.

Some images I took during the sculpt mode. I didn't actually use the sculpt mode at all, but I thought the colours and highlights looked really cool!

In the process of designing the firebox and how it would visually affect the gun. I didn't fully plan this out, so right now the wire extended to behind the ejection port.

Random render that I took because I thought it looked cool, like a 2D sketch brought to life in 3D.

Starting the process of deciding what basic colours I wanted to use for my Ion Uzi. At first, the top reciever was painted blue, which I thought looked ok...

... until I actually tested them out in game and was a bit horrified. I fondly remember telling people something along the lines of "it looks like some crappy Overwatch guns."

After the embarrasment of the last colouration, I kept the red heat shield, and changed the upper reciever to a lighter gun-metal tone. Also added much needed detail, scratches and a grain effect.

Hand guard removed because you won't see it in-game.

Another attempt at porting my 3D design into a 2D sprite for the game. As you can see here, at first the guns were very large and chunky looking, which looked cool but obscured too much of the screen me thinks.

Random cool screenshot

Setting up a camera in Blender and seeing how it would look from a 1st person perspective.

I experimented with the colour correction and shadows.

Nearing the final stages of my Ion Uzi. Notice how flat the model looks.

Now I'm happy with how the 2D sprite looks, I began painting over each sprite by hand. With just under 20 individual sprites, with each one taking around 1-2 hours to adjust... yea. This process took several days.

Final look of my Ion Uzi, with added Voxel models (which was so tedious to make),