M69 Lasernugget

I May Suck At Names, But At Least I'm Good At Weapon Design

This was a "Just For Fun" piece, inspired by my frustrations while scrolling through Artstaton and Pinterest searching for inspiration for alt-history and gritty sci-fi weapons, and finding almost exclusively odd mish-mashes of 20th century assault rifles with ill-defined greeble thrown on without rhyme, reason, or thought given to how the pieces came together or what function any component served. With this, jokingly called the "M69 Lasernugget", I chose to lean into those strange tendencies as much as possible, bastardizing the M1 Garand, the Mosin-Nagant, and probably a few others along the way, and then applying the strangest flairs I could think of, such as a battery-powered ignition, and a glowy bayonet. Is it plasma? Is it a forcefield? How does it work when it has no battery? Who knows! Who cares! Definitely not all the weapon concept artists I kept finding during my searches. Still, overall I was pretty happy with this piece, and I think it came out remarkably well given that it was my first time experimenting with subd modeling workflows. I really do see the appeal of those workflows, now. When you're constantly aware of your topology and its impacts, it both consciously and unconsciously pushes your hand towards best practices, which is really nice because it means that by the end you've got all quads all the time and you spend literally zero time cleaning up poles or non-manifold geometry. I'm definitely gonna be coming back to these kinds of subd workflows for my future work, this was awesome!