With Mass Effect 3 coming out late this year I have decided to finally try my hand at making props of a few of the weapons from the Mass Effect universe. I figured setting up a progress blog might be useful as both an effort to keep me motivated and also to share the fruits of my labour with other interested fans.
I'm going to be starting off with pistol sized weapons as my prop making skills are weak (aka untested) and I don't want to tackle something that will overwhelm me right off the bat.
My first piece will be a basic heavy pistol... the M-3 Predator.
Eventually I hope to do the Carnifex heavy pistol, the M8 assault rifle and the Widow anti-materiel rifle as well. We will see how my first attempt goes though as this might turn out to be a massive exercise in futiliy.
However... on a more positive note... let's see what progress I have made so far on the heavy pistol.
The first step was to obtain accurate source images. I looked carefully but everything I found on the internet was totally inadequate to get the job done so I decided to obtain the images myself. Using the Unreal model viewer (special thanks to drifter for recommending this program) I was able to find untextured 3D meshes from the game of the weapons I am interested in building.
After importing those meshes into Blender (which was a massively frustrating exercise on its own) I was able to take some good screen shots of all the orthographic views and then proceeded to trace them out in Adobe Illustrator.
After a good amount of monkeying around I came up with these templates which are the exact proportion of the weapon in the game... the overall scale is to fit in my hands though so they may be a little larger/smaller than compared to the characters in Mass Effect. I'm not upset about this though because if it's scaled to me they will look good my hands
. At least the actual proportions should be bang on.
Unfortunately interpreting these orthographic drawings and building them in real life can be a lot harder than you may think so I decided to make a mock up out of cheap building materials (pink insulation, foam board and white glue). Here is the pistol as it sits now. Keep in mind that there has been no bevelling or any finishing details... this is just simple shapes cut from my templates. My plan is to use the measurements from this mock up to cut parts out of MDF and then use that plus bondo to create the nice smooth and curved surfaces you see in the actual pistol.
I think this is a pretty good start though... I only have a few more parts to add to this mock up before getting patterns ready to cut out of wood. Then it's time for a hell of a lot of sanding, bondo, sanding,dremel and sanding work.
I'm going to be starting off with pistol sized weapons as my prop making skills are weak (aka untested) and I don't want to tackle something that will overwhelm me right off the bat.
My first piece will be a basic heavy pistol... the M-3 Predator.
Eventually I hope to do the Carnifex heavy pistol, the M8 assault rifle and the Widow anti-materiel rifle as well. We will see how my first attempt goes though as this might turn out to be a massive exercise in futiliy.
However... on a more positive note... let's see what progress I have made so far on the heavy pistol.
The first step was to obtain accurate source images. I looked carefully but everything I found on the internet was totally inadequate to get the job done so I decided to obtain the images myself. Using the Unreal model viewer (special thanks to drifter for recommending this program) I was able to find untextured 3D meshes from the game of the weapons I am interested in building.
After importing those meshes into Blender (which was a massively frustrating exercise on its own) I was able to take some good screen shots of all the orthographic views and then proceeded to trace them out in Adobe Illustrator.
After a good amount of monkeying around I came up with these templates which are the exact proportion of the weapon in the game... the overall scale is to fit in my hands though so they may be a little larger/smaller than compared to the characters in Mass Effect. I'm not upset about this though because if it's scaled to me they will look good my hands
. At least the actual proportions should be bang on.
Unfortunately interpreting these orthographic drawings and building them in real life can be a lot harder than you may think so I decided to make a mock up out of cheap building materials (pink insulation, foam board and white glue). Here is the pistol as it sits now. Keep in mind that there has been no bevelling or any finishing details... this is just simple shapes cut from my templates. My plan is to use the measurements from this mock up to cut parts out of MDF and then use that plus bondo to create the nice smooth and curved surfaces you see in the actual pistol.
I think this is a pretty good start though... I only have a few more parts to add to this mock up before getting patterns ready to cut out of wood. Then it's time for a hell of a lot of sanding, bondo, sanding,dremel and sanding work.
