The xm177e2, a pilot's best friend

A shot of xm177e2 using Xoliul's excellent directX shader

This rifle was interesting to me because it was sort of similar to the sort of 'elite' kinds of rifles you see in modern warfare type games- it was the precursor to the M4- but it's also kind of weird and awkward looking.  The age of it gave me some latitude to make it look pretty bashed up, since the story it was made for takes place in the 80s and the rifle was first developed in the 60s.  It was used in the vietnam war.  In gathering reference for the rifle, I learned that its early versions had all kinds of problems that made the bullets suddenly turn sideways and tumble in flight, and the muzzle blast was too loud so it was really a pain to shoot.  These kinds of tidbits are really interesting to me, and gave me an excuse to make a giant fireball come out the end of it when it is shot at night.  Everyone loves huge fireballs, right?

A friend of mine had a similar 'training' type rifle lying around, so I was able to get the general dimensions of it using micrometer calipers- not that I needed measurements accurate down to a micrometer, it's just the set of calipers I had access to.

Like the other assets I made for Cold War Rearmed ², this one has several LODs.  The first LOD has about 6000 points, which is about average for assets in Operation Arrowhead, and the last one has 600.  The textures are entirely hand painted.