Breakdown: How a Glock Works

I started the Glock project on February 24th, 2018. Roughly 546 hours later, I put the final touches on the animation:

As with all projects, I started out by doing a lot of research on the subject. World of Guns was an absolute life-saver in trying to figure out the Glock. Being able to slow down the animation, hide parts, etc. made it extremely easy to break it down. Of course, many reference images were used in trying to get some of the finer details.

Modeling

Once I had a better understanding of how the Glock worked, I started creating the model. As a starting place for the exterior, I purchased a pre-built Glock 19 model from TurboSquid.  The interior needed to be completely modeled to accommodate all the working parts.

In the end, I ended up creating around 50 separate parts for the entire model in Cinema 4D:

UV Unwrapping

After finalizing the rig, I needed to unwrap the UVs of the frame, slide, barrel, and magazine. This was necessary in order to properly texture these parts. RizomUV made it extremely easy and fun to complete the job:

Texturing & Materials

Next, I brought the models into Substance Painter for texturing:

I used Corona to create the materials for the remaining parts of the model:

Corona Materials

Corona Node Materials

Storyboarding

At this point, I was ready to begin storyboarding:

Animation

When I was happy with the storyboard, I was ready to move on to animation. Cinema 4D’s Take System came in handy to organize each of my shots:

Rendering

There was no way I would render every frame on my 2012 MacBook Pro. I’d heard a lot of great things about Pixel Plow, and decided to give that a shot. It was quite easy and affordable to render roughly 3 minutes of animation. I would highly recommend them if you’re looking to use a render farm.

Compositing

The final step was to composite all the frames inside After Effects. This is where I added special effects and transitions to make things really pop.

For the voiceover in the animation, I used an awesome guy by the name of Andy Taylor. I would highly recommend him if you’re looking for a professional sounding voice in your projects.

The music in the animation is a track from Killer Tracks. They’re a little on the expensive side, but they tend to have a larger library of material to choose from.

Conclusion

This is a very brief explanation of what went into the Glock project. You can see that there are many parts that make up the entire animation. I really enjoyed this project, and hope you all do as well! As always, use either the comments below, or feel free to send me an email if you have any questions about this project!