This ancient piece of futuristic tech is the "Electronic Eraser". A very unique "CRYO" contraption. After rediscovering this beautiful machine, our scientists have managed to figure out how to boot it up and utilize it for "spreading peace". [//HANDLE WITH CARE//]

Anyways, back to the actual description of this scene. This is an "Ancient weapon" I created for one of my more recent college assignments. It started off as just a concept and I didn't mean to create much of a scene for that assignment, however I fell in love with this model and decided to continue work on it.

How does it fit into the category of "Ancient weapon"? It fits as ancient as this would be considered "ancient future" rather than ancient past, this is because of the in universe description of the weapon being lost and found centuries later.

For this project, I used a variety of tools and techniques. for the basic shape, I used Booleans, bevels and extrusions to box model my way to victory. As for the textures, I designed the ice liquid textures using Substance 3D Designer and included a switch node so that I could toggle the gradient as seen on the bullet casings. For the rest of the model, I utilized Substance 3D Painter with a couple of techniques, including baking, generators and removing from black masks over a fill layer. I even used new & unique Substance 3D Painter tools such as the sticker tool for the warning sticker and physics brushes so that I could simulate real oil drips & spills.

Next, during animation, I used blender for your usual tweening animations. From blender, I used the graph editor to edit and customise the interpolation of the animations so that the barrel would have some over spin to it, so that the robot arm would have some janky pull back and so that the emission brightness smoothly turned to the required strength.

In the rendering stage, I played around with Eevee, Cycles and even the new alpha version of Eevee Next which includes impressive features such as real-time raytracing. After comparing all three, I decided to render stills with Cycles and use Eevee Next for the animation so that I could benefit from the lighting effects.

Finally, I used compositing nodes to give the finished renders some sparkle. more specifically, I used the camera distortion node to add a small amount of chromatic aberration and I used the glair node on the fog glow option to get the bloom effect in my final renders.
And that's that!! I'm really happy with how it turned out and I'm even happier to finally be able to share this project with the world. keep up the good work artists and thanks for stopping by!