The Holo-Tiger UMP-45

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A project that we haven't shared much about as of yet is — Heist Club.

This will be an animated series about a group of characters that live a double life. Museum heists by night, advertising jobs by day. They have a love for custom guns and expensive artifacts. ‍

Heist Club follows their teamwork in robbing historical artifacts and bringing them back into the public cycle.

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A character and their gun

One of the characters is Åke, an overconfident thief with a true love for the shiny and brand new.

Åke carries his trusted UMP-45 submachine gun. Even though he barely gets to use it as museum heists tend to be far less action-packed than he's prepared for.

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Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

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As you can notice, this character loves the flashy. Whether it's the clothing he chooses or the weapon he caries — they have to make him shine.

This lead us to designing Åke's UMP-45 with a custom suppressor and holographic-tiger camo in mind:

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The Process

The small white dots on the rifle are micro dust specs. This is one of the easiest methods of adding realism to your 3D-models. For as far as I can remember I've been using the incredible easyDust collection by Timothee Maron!

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This test render of the submachine gun was rendered with only an HDRI environment light. And to achieve realistic depth of field I'm using custom aperture maps from our Bokeh Builder product.

The more complicated part of this render was getting nice looking textures on the gun. Guns have an incredible amount of surface imperfections.
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Even when they are "brand new" the process of making gun components puts quite a toll on all the mechanical parts that are manufactured. From small roughness details such as scratches, to oil marks — there is incredible variation on a fresh gun.

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I used Substance 3D Painter for texturing the entire gun asset. My personal computer is not the strongest so I was working on a relatively low resolution for this asset.

For the hero assets of Heist Club we will be working with higher-fidelity 3D models and high-res textures.

The holographic shader is also something I've done many iterations on. However, in this case I wouldn't even dare calling it holographic. The shader in its current state operates more like an iridescent shader.

But I have a pretty solid idea of how to achieve a functional three-dimensional holographic shader by using a stack of angled normal maps.

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Conclusion

The final render is being made inside of Cinema 4D using Chaos Corona. The holographic shader is built separately inside of Chaos Corona using nodes. And it's being revealed with a black and white alpha mask exported from Substance 3D Painter.

Depending on the angle in which the gun is seen, the colors of the holographic pattern will be different.

For the next iterations I will add three-dimensional etching into the holo tiger so that the holo gets directly affected by the specular hotspot.

But for now — this is Åke's UMP-45 for Heist Club

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