LN Duo II – The Concept
- July 1st, 2011
- By Frodo
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Everyone who played Outcast will remember this truly legendary weapon shown above – The LN Duo 500. In this blog posting I would like to explain the process behind the re-design of that weapon for openOutcast from the very first idea in 2D to the finished model in 3D…
The first thing we do at the 2D sector is to look at the original weapon in all possible angles and think of a possible new design. How could it look like ? What was bad in the original design? What could we do better ? To answer these questions we need sketches, a lot of ideas and – the most important thing – lots of feedback.
With the first draft of the weapon design I tried to “improve” the original shape with dynamic lines…unfortunately it didn’t really look like a weapon because of the bulky and squarry base shape. One of the questions at this time was, if the new weapons should more look like the old ones or not. And if Appeal used very primitive shapes because of the technical limitations back in the days when OC1 was designed? Would they have taken more “human-army-look-a-like” weapons with a more or less sci-fi look if they could? In the end we decided to create something new BUT to keep parts of the original and recognizable design in the new concept. And this is what was coming out then:
I wanted to keep the element of “take your hand IN the weapon to grab it”. So I just thought: “Let’s improve that weapon only with more barrels and lets see how it’d look like.” You can see the sketch below but I finally recognized that this design wasn’t the right direction neither. The rotation element would maybe look cool but it is not very useful (Basically you could shot yourself with it 
). It could be dangerous and why should someone use such a system if we already have the revolver system in most of other nade launchers ?
So after some more discussions and feedback we finally started to approach to the final idea. I decided to also keep the characteristic barrel angle of about 45°. In this case I only needed to redesign the rest of the gun, instead of the barrels and for that I searched the net for similar ideas. Team member Berserkr posted some reference pictures and videos and so I came to the pencil sketches below. Pencil sketches are always my first step on the way to the final pictures. They can be done everywhere and it is always something else to draw on paper instead of using some tablets and a monitor.
If I’m needed to create a digital version of this pencil sketch, I just take a photo and overpaint/colour it in “Sketchbook” or “Photoshop”. After a few more feedback rounds I was able to show up the final sketch of the LN DUO II then:
What’s missing now is some material information for the 3D artists and a short 2 frame sketch of the reload animation. Because these sketches aren’t done yet we will present them in the next episode where you can see how our 3D artist are working on the actual 3D mesh and the reload animation of the LN DUO II. I hope you enjoyed reading the post and be patient: The next episode is coming really soon 
