This my interpretation of the iconic Plasma Pistol from the Halo game franchise. Halo has a lot of excellent sci-fi hard surface designs. It was one of my favorite games growing up, so when I started studying 3D and was looking for things to try and make, the Halo Assault Rifle was actually one of my first ‘real’ projects. I started this project in late 2019, and later in mid-2020 I came back a made a few tweaks with what I had learned since.
The Type-25 Directed Energy Pistol, or T-25 DEP, is the standard sidearm of the Covenant - an alliance of alien species who are the series primary antagonists. Covenant materials have a distinctly alien look to them, a sort of metallic, iridescent beetle-shell chitin. It’s usually purple, blue, or sometimes burgundy, and occasionally has a hex pattern on it. For my materials, I applied a similar iridescence with fresnel and used a procedural hex pattern for texture on the main chitin material. The two metal tones have some minor shimmer.
Like most of Halo’s designs, the Plasma Pistol looked bit different in each installment. This piece is my own interpretation, incorporating my favorite parts of each iteration. Specifically, this is the T-25 Plasma Pistol, which is distinct from the T-54 featured in Halo 5. It’s most similar to the H4, H2A, and HR versions.
As one of my first serious hard surface studies, this project taught me a lot about bevel, subdiv, and booleans in HS workflows. I didn’t do a normal bake to low poly for this, though, since I didn’t know much about that at the time. I also learned more about manual UV wrapping in complex geometry, trying to keep that hex pattern consistent in a way that auto-project could not.