I made this minigun for a 3D modelling project that I set for myself to improve my skills in hard surface modelling, PBR texturing and making game ready assets. I chose to model this M134 Minigun as I've been heavily interested and influenced by weapon models in video games. I went through a lot of research to make this minigun, taking lots of references from Royal Range USA and Forgotten Weapons for breaking down the minigun, and also Royal Armouries for their video on how miniguns work in video games.
I aimed to get the model as close to a working game asset. I decided to include adding my own control box mounted near the handle of the minigun as I felt this would add some more interesting and working features to the asset.
The M134 Vulcan Minigun
A piece of weaponry I chose to model as I thought "this would be dope to make", and it was.
I spent hours upon hours researching this gun so that I could learn everything I could about what this gun looked like, learn about the important functioning parts and how this gun operates.
It was important to me to know how the gun operates as I wanted the gun to look like it would work if it were animated in a video game, as I wanted it to be believable in a game-play scenario.
I am very happy with both how much modelling I was able to achieve and the level of quality I achieved in the modelling and texturing. What I felt like worked well was how much focus I put into the modelling as I put a lot more time into the modelling over a lot of the other aspects of this gun model as the more I modeled the more I felt like I was adding more detail to the 3D asset, plus this meant I could add texture to these extra parts I was modelling.
Because this was a university project, there was the constraint of time, and because of the extra work I was putting into the modelling, there were some sacrifice of time into texturing and even some plans to get my model into Z-Brush to add some "micro-details". By week 10 of my university trimester, I was pushing the modelling so much that I hadn't even started UV unwrapping my model, so unwrapping came down to a bit of a crunch. Interestingly enough though, once I finished my first iteration of UV unwrapping I felt like it was easier to add in more to the overall model.
I decided to test out rendering some shots using Unreal Engine 5 as I felt like using the newer flashy software now while I'm studying. The pay off was that Unreal Engine really helped the rendering quality of my work, and I was able to learn and tinker with some of the render and camera settings as I was able to render the footage out rather quickly.
Music in show-reel:
"Doomsday Machine; Written by Christoph Lindemann, Christoph Bartelt and Philipp Lippitz; Performed by Kadavar; Courtesy of Nuclear Blast."
