Re: M41-A PULSE RIFLE manual & poster
Hey there boochydog!
Sorry for the late reply, I didn't see your post until today.
Hm, what would you like to know? There's a link to the original WIP thread and the WIP pics just above your post.
Other than that, I can tell you that I started this project a looong time ago, I believe I had the original idea in 2008. Having almost no prior knowledge in 3D modelling, I was able to get the necessary programs/licenses from an architect friend of mine. I then built the Pulse Rifle in a matter of several months, painstakingly incorporating every detail as faithfully as possible to the movie accurate rifle, taking measurements from my real firearm parts whenever possible. The result is a complex, high-polygon 3D model of the M41-A Pulse Rifle. While there already are 3D models of the Pulse Rifle to be found on the internet, most of them are either low-detail models for games or based on Pulse Rifle replicas with lots of inaccuracies. Therefore, I built my 3D Pulse Rifle completely from scratch and tried to make it the most detailed Pulse Rifle model to date.
Then came the texturing, which was a pain. The correct brown bess color is difficult to achieve on a real model, on a 3D-model with unlimited lighting options, it was simply horrible.
Once I got that far, I wasn't happy with some aspects of the rifle. I started out as a complete "noob" and learned most of this stuff by doing it, so when I began, I didn't know Turbosmooth and all the other nifty tricks. So I almost completely remodeled the rifle from the ground up. After extensive remodeling and re-texturing of the rifle, I finally achieved results that give the final renderings a very clean, professional and "corporate" feel while being as photorealistic as possible at the same time. For the poster on the other hand, I have tried to replicate the heavy "weathered" look of the Ripley Pulse rifle as closely as possible, and all the visible finger prints, nicks and all the abuse really made that poster great! You should see one of the posters in life size, the detail is pretty amazing!
Then I started with other stuff, there's the motion tracker, the "black" Alien3 pulse rifle, the smart gun and the Flamer in the manual, as well as all the ammo, the PR case etc. Once this was done, I had to get the best shots possible, which was hit or miss. You set up a shot, render it and lighting or shadows or something may be way off. Due to the large required size, re-rendering images took quite a while.
Also, since starting the project, I lost one PC during rendering the poster (9933 x 7016 pixels), the hard disk simply didn't survive it, and lost the file with most of the setup for the poster and a couple of other files. That was quite a setback. Later on, before rendering most of the manual pages, I again got a new PC and discovered that I had to completely re-setup my scenes due to some unknown error. That wasn’t fun as well.
And suddenly, about 9 years later, I was done. All images in the manual are original and created by me in 3DS Max 2010 with VRay, with post-production work done in Photoshop CS5. Then I had the manual extensively proof-read, had to design the manual page design and stick to a common theme in it. And once I was confident that I was done, I had them printed.
All in all, I must have spent an estimated 2’000 hours on this thing. It doesn’t have as many pages as the “military style” manual that was available back in the beginning of the millennium and is just a small “brochure” compared to it, but I like to believe that the imagery is quite a bit more complex. Also, back in the day when I wanted to get one of those “military style manual”, I was quoted $130 including worldwide shipping. So even though my prices may be high (and let me tell you, Switzerland isn’t cheap and shipping a single poster to the US costs me almost $20), I still think it’s not a bad deal. But hey, I made the manual for the hard-core fans like me, that’s why I didn’t print a thousand of them to sell for $10 each, because that’s an investment I wouldn’t get back.
Aliens isn't as popular anymore as it was 30 years ago, and right now it seems there are 742 lightsaber threads and no Pulse Rifle love to be found.
Hope that clears things up. Feel free to E-Mail me if you have any more questions.
Cheers!
Roman
