I’ve been a huge fan of Valve ever since downloading Half-Life: Uplink from a game demos website back in 1999, then running out to purchase the full game after saving up enough nickles and dimes. Since the release of Half-Life 2, I have been eying the Gravity Gun, and though I have put a lot of research into it I still feel there is too big of a gap between the player-view and world-view models to truly decipher it into a real-world prop and give it the due I think it deserves. I could always compromise on both models in effort to reach the middle ground, but with the graphics in each episode getting better as time went on, I thought it best to wait. Episode 2 had just been released with the Orange Box, so operating under the presumption that Episode 3 would be along in another year, possibly with a newly updated model for the Gravity Gun, I halted the build and put my research aside for another day. That was four years ago, and not a word on Episode 3 or Half-Life 3 since. Fortunately, the Orange Box came packaged with a new obsession: Portal.
It is hard to ignore the similarities between the Aperture Science Hand-held Portal Device (AKA Portal Gun) and the Gravity Gun; if you like one it’s likely you enjoy the other. With the world-view and player-view models showing quite a bit of consistency I knew it wouldn’t be too difficult finding that middle ground without huge compromises. Volpin’s brilliant build came onto the scene a couple of years ago to show us it could be done and it could look fantastic, and I was getting antsy waiting for Episode/Half-Life 3, so late last summer I decided that diving into the Portal Gun seemed like the next best thing.
Diving might be too strong of a word; I certainly took my time. I spent from October till January going through screen shots, ripping models, checking measurements, researching materials, creating sketches, blueprints and planing my attack before I started building. It was importaint to me that if I took on the build I didn’t just copy how others did it in the past, but came up with my own method that would hopefully stand out on its own. At Aperture we do all of our science from scratch. No hand holding!
Now that this first build is done, you can see its progress from beginning to end. Enjoy!
This is not mine, I found it here!
