Lightning Gun - PAX Project Breakdown

It took 7 days of non-stop printing and 13 days total to produce this monster for AMD's Quake Champions booth at PAX Australia. This was an /insane/ project. Everyone involved was working on an unbelievably short time frame and we all (somehow) produced the goods. I cannot thank Carson Cosplay, Pandemodia Cosplay and Gaming and Nguran Cosplay for working with me to bring this to life.

As it was a rush order, we were provided the in game 3D models to work from. These were given to Carson Cosplay who is a true master of file manipulation (seriously, this guy is gooooooooooood) to clean up and make into a much more printable and workable piece.

Once the gun was prepped for printing, the file was sent back to me with 16 main sections (technically 32 as everything had a mirrored component) and some of the larger pieces required to be sliced further (there were 14 slices for the larger pieces, ie: the main body frame, trigger and outer panels) to fit on my two printers. I used my modified Davinci XYZ and CR-10 for this which meant my prints had to fit within 20x20x20cm and 30x30x40cm.

After all the pieces were printed (in a mix of ABS and PLA due to time and temperature constraints) they were filled, sanded and assembled over 3 days and with the help of Pandemodia we were able to get the full assembly completed, all pieces are 2 part epoxy, ABS melted and screwed together. Lining up the core and front of the gun was pretty frustrating as the gun was such an awkward shape to hold and work around.

Once, and also while, assembly was underway, Nguran Cosplay took over painting, using colour shifting metallics for the front green panels, rose gold and titanium gold for the main sections. The central core was also dusted with holographic rainbow spray to give it a cool effect when the light shone on it.

Two days before we flew out there was a major disaster with this piece thanks to crazy weather, but we were able to repair and fix with the damages that occurred.

All in all, I am extremely proud of this build and my team for smashing this prop out. It's really satisfying to hold and I know with more time we could have done so much more, but for a rush prop, I'm really happy with the results.