Space Pirate Data File 26.74.883
Rejoice!
Many capable scientists, honorable soldiers and even our beloved leaders have lost their life in the long struggle for galactic domination and the eradication of the accursed Hunter,Samus Aran. But it was not in vain, for now we have acquired complete data on the highly advanced chozodian technology of Aran's Powersuit and Armcannon. Showing the functional mechanisms in meticulous detail, this breakthrough will allow us to design weapon systems far superior to anything in the Galaxy. Unlike earlier experiments based on empirically collected information, the recently started development of enhanced combat devices won't be a failure. The time for our ultimate victory over the Galactic Federation and their deadly pet, the Hunter, has come.
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Ah, well, another one of this training deviations, huh? Yes. Sort of. I guess everyone knows some objects, which are truly fascinating to look at, which have some special meaning or whatever. So, it's probably natural that, once a 3D artist, or an artist in general, feels like he has the necessary abilities to reproduce that object artistically, he will do it.
And that's the case here.

After or while playing Metroid Prime 3, I just felt like I'd eventually model something out of that game. It's that inspiring. And because a complete Samus model is still out of reach, I began with the armcannon...looks simple enough, doesn't it?
It was definititely a good exercise, in modeling (especially making the hull of the cannon), in lighting (getting an even, studio-like, but still realistic lighting) and in texturing (getting an in-game, yet somewhat realistic look). For the first time I used node materials in Blender and eventually learned the basics behing them. They truly provide some powerful methods to enhance and generate materials and it's certainly something which I will use as often as possible (and it's a reason to use Blender's Internal rendering engine! Which will get some new, exciting features some day.)

The Metroid Fans among you will notice, that this is obviously not a true reproduction of the Armcannon, but an "enhanced" one. Thus the introduction, I'd say that this is a copy of the true chozodian technology produced by the Space pirates. It is based on (selfmade) screenshots of the Samus Gallery in MP 3 and the in-game armcannon.
Also, on a side note, no, I'm not a weapon fanatic, even if my latest deviations don't look like that

Technical notes: The model consists of 15,751 vertices, 13,557 faces. Lighting is done with Ambient Occlusion, one omnilamp and one arealight. Materials are node based, textures mostly procedural, the hexagon tile was done in Photoshop.
Postproduction used to do the yellowish-orangeish glow, compositing the different views together and the Typo on the left.

Well, that's it...it's not really a christmas present but still - hoep you like it and have a good time