Inspired by my nerdy love of retro space guns, and Nazi Zombies, I give you my first (of what I’m sure will be many) rayguns. It’s a simple design (doesn’t even have a trigger!) but a good starter. I plan to make a few more, and already have tons of ideas for them. This one took less than an hour, and I love it.

Jon sent me a link to a neat plugin for Sketchup, but it’s complicated, and I haven’t had any luck figuring it out. It’s basically a studio for adding lighting effects and hi-res textures. If I could get this thing in there I could add some sweet effects. I plan to mess around with it later on if possible.

One of the things I want to do, which I know is possible with that plugin (just not sure how), is add some light emitting properties to the green materials. I think it would look much better if all the green was glowing, and I’d like to see about adding some static around the orb at the end.

I also want to add some more details in Sketchup. It needs a trigger (or a telekinetic operator) and a recharge meter, as well as a battery status indicator, and perhaps a radiation warning. I also want to make a big laser cannon, and a rifle phaser.

Unfortunately that will all have to wait, since this week I have to redo my rough draft of the book layout, then model a bunch of tools for the appendix and a couple machines for my brother.

We spent 5 hours working his project last night, and it’s looking awesome. He took a video of a walkthrough he made, and posted it on his Facebook page, but I can’t seem to steal it to embed here. I’ll have to ask him to upload it somewhere I can get it – it’s pretty dope.

*I linked all the images to the original size, hi-res images, so if you like the pictures at all, click them for an even better version.