Hurricane Launcher v2 Prop...?

This is an updated design based on the Hurricane Launcher concept I did last year for the comic and a similar rifle design from this more recent piece. The intention is to make a 3d printable model out of it.

Verified the ending location of the stock and the placement/proportion of the grip with a photo overlay of a SCAR-H

Actual proportion is smaller than the one depicted in the concept art, this looks better with optics

Used more non-right-angle shape splitting to unify the look of the entire device

Removed the PVS device in the front to lower the overall visual height, and the middle optical device has seen more modifications

Redesigned the PVS device to not obstruct the iron sight, redesigned the gas pipe arrangement

Pipe arrangement changes and rear scope adjustments

At this point I started doing structural drawings for internal elements and fastening elements. Here the main solenoid, chamber tube and the stock structure is depicted.

The battery compartment and fastening structure for the middle body. The structure behind the ejection port is quite slim, this requires extra support in the front portion of the middle body (currently done via screw in the front of the chamber), and the use of extra thick shell.

Redesigned the installation structure for the main trigger. In the first a spring pusher is installed, then the trigger body is pushed downwards and locked in place.

Rough structure of the decorative scope and the forebody. The middle scope has to be installed to stop the upper forebody from bending downwards. If not installed, a placeholder hook must be installed in the same place to stop the bending moment.

Finished analyzing the main structure, some problems:

• The structure of which main grip is connected to the main body may not allow the wiring for the main solenoid to pass through to the back.
• Upper forebody may have a bending moment on the in and out direction against the image.
• Mode switches has little to no room for articulation and assembling.
• Locations for other switches and potentialmeters are not arranged.
• Not entirely sure how lower front and upper middle structure can be fixed onto the main structure.

The exterior appearance was modified slightly from the issues seen from the structure design

• Restored the externalgas pipe structure on the back for convenience of wiring.
• Put non-essential mode switches on the stock.
• Verification of screw hole locations and part splitting lines.

Spatial relationship of shapes were checked in 3D before analyzing the structure.

Spent quite some time to take care of the subdivision surface of the shell. Since there's tons of geometry elements that are used to control curvature, this process is not particularly efficient, especially when you need to fine tune/modify some forms, however looptools can help with features that are mostly planar/linear.

All shell components after taking care of subdivision:

Viewed from the top:

Started making structures for installation.

Rough structure in the center portion.

Battery compartment and the position for the smoke generator.

A particular problem in this stage of modeling is to create a inner shell for the shell that's already modeled with subdiv. This portion is not visually complex but took quite some time to do. Directly calling solidify on this kind of surfaces will result in very long post-processing time and relatively bad surface quality for the inner shell as well as uneven thickness. Afterwards the remaining surfaces are all shelled out manually portions by portion and connected together afterwards, it then gave better result and saved more time.

A relatively visually complex structure manually shelled.

The shell is starting to take shape.

Continuing on the structure of the decorative scope. In principle it's OK to print these as a unibody, however by splitting them into two or three parts, more screws can be hidden, as well as allowing shorter hex driver shaft when assembling, and exposed screws can be placed at visually pleasing locations.

There are tons of issues with boolean in blender. Looks like I should seal the shell but this can affect the subdiv shape in the middle part.

Later I got it to work more or less reliably, I made a geometry node system to toggle half and full view of the model as a solid.

For these small parts, only using crease seems to be more convenient.