Gun Barrel

I am now going to create the gun barrel for the iconic James Bond sequence at the start of every film. This will be seen at the end of my trailer.


The first thing to do was to create a tube in the scene. I set the radius and then put the height to -2000. This will make the tube long, which is needed. I chose to use an even number of sides, as they will form the grooves in the gun barrel. In this case, I chose 28.



(pic 1)


Next up, I selected the edges within the barrel using the top view. By selecting loop and ring from the selection panel, it selects all the edges for you. I then used chamfer, which placed extra edges in for the barrel grooves.




(pic 2)

Next I switched to polygon selection and chose each of the edges within the tube. Using the extrude tool I was able to bring the panels out slightly, increasing the size of the grooves within the tube.



(pic 3)



I noticed that the extruded parts were not in line with the rest of the tube. To solve this I switched to the scale tool and was able to drag the x and y axis until they were inline. During this model I have also learnt how to use the snaps toggle. This is very useful when trying to place something somewhere specific.




(pic 4)


Next up, I switched to the top view and selected all of the horizontal edges. Using the connect tool, I put in an extra 80 edges. As you can see from the picture, this caused 3ds max to crash! Luckily I managed to get it working without crashing.



(pic 5)


Now I will show the material that I used for the inside of the gun barrel. Using a new multi/sub object material, I set ID 1 to be standard black.




(pic 6)


ID2 was more complex, using bump as noise, and reflection as raytrace. On the model itself, ID1 was set as the entire tube using polygon selection. ID2 was set to be the inside panels of the tube (see pic 3). In the bump setting, I used 1%. This material was then applied to the tube model.




(pic 7)


Next up was animating a camera. I inserted a line through the middle of the tube, running exactly to the same length, so 2000. I placed a free camera in the centre of the tube next to this line. I then clicked on the motion panel next to create, modify etc. This brings up a new menu where I selected Assign controller. From here I chose position XYZ. This brings up a new menu with a list of options (pic 8). From the list choose path constraint. This then allows you to select the line created earlier that will be used as the camera path. It puts the keyframes in automatically, I found I had to switch the keyframes over as the camera was going the wrong way.




(pic 8)

Next I added a plane at the end of the image as well as a free light. This will reflect and refract the light when the scene is rendered. Finally, I added a twist modifier that gives the effect seen below (pic 9). The angle I used was -540. This gives a good twist on the gun barrel.



(pic 9)


Finally I added a meshsmooth modifier and rendered the image.





(pic 10)