After making a poll on Twitter I started a new project in which I promised to make some cool-looking weapons since that was the winning vote of the poll and over a 10 day period, I only created a single weapon instead of making more than one.
Just like my last project which was the Sci-Fi Doors I wanted to make something that I had designed myself and I already had an idea of what I wanted to make. The idea came from a simple drawing that I drew years ago around about the same time as the Sci-Fi Doors which was of this rose looking particle beam/laser weapon which I later in 2018ish decided that it was a weapon that a character/person could use if they attached it to there back and it would deploy over there shoulders.
Link to the original post on WIX: https://taminaionanimation.wixsite.com/taminaion/post/orion-rose-cannon
The first thing to start making this model was create the butt end of the Core which at the time I thought I was just making the core but we will talk more about the Core later in the project and all you need to know is that I made this so i could have something to scale my rose off of.
Actually making this model was more complicated than it seemed mainly because I had no idea how to make the rose shape in the first place but I experimented with it and the way I eventually made the rose shape was to take a cylinder and use proportional editing to scale one end of the cylinder before cutting a “V” shapes into the sides and then mirroring it all which gave me the basic shape I was looking for and that’s all I can remember after that part I have completely forgotten what I did.
I looked at the save files to try and figure out what I had done but version 106 is still at the mirrored stage and version 107 is the cool looking shape so its a mystery to me but I’m glad it happened because compared to my drawing it looks way better in my opinion.
Cylinder Proportionally Edited 
Small “V” Shape 
Larger “V” Shape 
Mirrored Stage 
Cool Looking rose Shape 
Rendered Version
Once this miracle happened I stuck with that shape which I then spent hours adjusting here and there trying to make it look perfect but one of the main things I did to the rose was remove a lot of Tris (Fixed on the left Unfixed on the right) the only ones to exist on the rose now are at the edges where it intersects with what I call the CORE of the cannon since I used a Booleen.
Even after getting the Rose into the right shape I was still tweaking it every 5 minutes but most of my time was focused on the CORE which was actually the original cylinder that I proportionally scaled and just left there because I actually liked the look of it that way and I eventually joined it with the butt-end of the core.
In my original drawing there is no design for the core and I also had no idea how to design one so I did what anyone would do in my situation and Winged it.
I mean I started just adding in loop cuts and extruding left and right or should I say up and down then connecting faces to form bridges adding in bevels for rounded bridges I kinda just went nuts with the design and it ended up looking really nice.
I thought the rose shape looked a little plain so I decided to add in some extra details and make the rose have panels as if it had been actually constructed and originally it had 8 (Right Side) but i decided that was too many so I merged them into 4 panels (Left Side)
The butt end of the Core went through a major change in the end I scrapped the original triangles for a beveled pattern and cut into the sides of the model to make a design so it did not look so plain.
Once I had designed the model it was time to add basic materials to the main elements and since it looked like a rose I went with a red and black colour scheme.
after adding basic materials I Tweeked them to look more metal and shiny before applying the color scheme to the sections I wanted while at the same time insetting and extruding to make the color scheme look a bit better
Just for the sake of concept I took my weapon mesh and applied it to a circle curve to make a death star looking particle weapon but without the actual laser so I decided to make that next.
Making the laser seemed simple enough thanks to a handy tutorial I found on Youtube in which you use a wave modifier and some simple nodes such as noise texture with an emission shader and by the looks of the images below it seems super easy and nice but you would be wrong.
It’s not that making the beam was hard or that getting the beam to parent to the curve and array around in a circle was difficult because that all went to plan but to get it to go where I wanted I had to apply all transforms which basically deactivated the wave modifier since I had to rotate the origin 90 degrees to get it to wave pattern to go upwards which also moved the beams that were parented to the curve.
I solved this issue by complete luck while messing around with rotating the original object and its origin… i’m still not sure what i did but it works and the original wave ended up here but since we don’t see it in the render it didn’t matter where it ended up.
Once I had the beams in the right place and I was happy I went ahead and started tweaking the lighting and look of the beams adding in some glare/fog glow as well as tweaking the contrast, hue and all that in the compositor.
Once I was happy with everything I rendered out 6 images all at different sample counts they were in order 128, 256, 512, 1024, 3000 and 1500×2 Branched path.
128 
256 
512 
1024 
3000 
1500×2
Once I had made the still image of my cannon firing the laser I wanted to make an animation but I also want to stress that the animation was just for concept and not actually a proper animation.
The first video was the original concept its only 120 frames and lasts a few seconds but it gets the point across I think.
The second and third Videos are the final concept videos they both do the same thing but the third video fades the beam in and out to show it powering up and down and the two videos look different because in the third video I merged the beam meshes together since each one had around 5-6 meshes each and I used a booleen to make them appear which I would have had to do for each mesh otherwise so I was just saving time.
As usual, I had spare renders and images of my model and its creation so I will share them here at the end.
The first image was me trying to inset some polygons but it did a weird triangle thing because I did not turn off one of the settings with the inset hotkey and in the second image I literally have 0 clues what happened I was just doing a simple hotkey and blender froze for a sec and that happened so no idea…
The third pic is the Red glow light to simulate the laser beam glowing.
