This is the first time I can demonstrate with any clarity just how three-dimensional these items really are. Much more illustrative than the stock 2D flatpic I'm quite fond of posting.
In any event, this is a commercial I crafted for my company's upcoming weapons, the twin gunblades MASAMUNE and MURAMASA.
Per the screencap/photoshopped ads, the tentative release date for these new gunblades is sometime in, hopefully early, October. Reason being that my newly hired scripter (a French person who is an actual programmer in real life) is currently working on the script and the current gunblade animations that I have for my other gunblades won't work on these, as the handles are set at 50 degrees from the alignment of the blade itself. So I have to give myself time to hire a custom animator.
Development
For some months now, I've been in a state of creative gestation, or a funk. My company seems to be doing fairly well in Second Life, enough to start cushioning real life to some degree, and I knew that the lull in sales basically meant it was time to go back into the workshop and start hammering out a new weapon.
I went through several experimental designs. As I deal primarily in hybrid weapons/gunblades these days, I toyed around with a variety of different combinations, all to no avail. Of those that started on the anvil and ended up in the trash were a Barrett .50 Sniper Rifle gunblade, a .50 AE Desert Eagle gunblade, and an M203 grenade launcher gunblade. Obviously, these designs may end up in a future project, but this summer when I tried them out they looked pretty dumb.
I played around with the idea of making a chainsword, akin to the ones they have in the Warhammer 40K universe. That also, went fairly uninspired, though.
In the end, I started having the most creative success with a symmetrical gunblade design based on a particle beam sandwiched between two isosceles blades with a future-weapon feel. In the end, though, this also proved to be something pretty that I just didn't feel satisfied with.
Around the beginning of August, I was wiki-ing around, reading up on Robocop for some reason (who knows why, and consequently, who can trace these walkabouts of thought anyhow?) and I saw a photo of him sporting is iconic "Auto-9" (a highly modded version of a Beretta M-93R). Suddenly something clicked, I even recall exclaiming something aloud in my apartment.
I went to work immediately, harvesting any large photo of Auto-9 that I could find. After I had a sufficient sample, I started to craft a 3D model. For some reason, whenever I start building a gun, I always start from the barrel. Fairly peculiar, I think, mainly because from a practical standpoint, starting from the aperture of the barrel would make scaling the object as a whole more difficult, but it is just one of those things I suppose.
About two thirds of the way finished, I had another flash of insight. This new project required a blade, but what blade or short sword would match Auto-9? I put the question in the back of my mind as I labored through crafting the handle and magazine, then I realized that the particle beam gunblade that I had trashed had the missing piece of the puzzle.
Originally constructed as a pair of isosceles "kite wings," the particle beam blade had a pronged look to it, and it sort of resembled the Vic Viper from the game Gradius. I took one of the kite wings off, and affixed it to the underside of the barrel of the Auto-9, and after taking a step back and looking at the whole thing, I realized I had basically finalized the iconic look of this gunblade.
Naturally, comparisons for the Masamune as a whole can be drawn between it and Seifer Almasy's Hyperion gunblade from FFVIII, mainly as the gun unit in the Hyperion was modeled after a standard Beretta M92. The larger blade with its blunted end, however, looks more like Yazoo's gunblade from FFVII Advent Children. In the end, I was more than satisfied with the result. I knew it was a keeper when I basically kept inspecting it from every angle, not to fine tune anything in particular, but because this weapon was wicked to look at. It was the same way I felt upon finalizing the Vendetta gunblades.
The Muramasa, the twin counterpart gunblade, came out as a way of acquiescing my urge to mold weapons around a story or legend. The legend of the rivalry between the famous Japanese swordsmiths Masamune and Muramasa is hinted at in several anime and video game titles, but few are really aware of how the stories actually go. Factually, this rivalry could not have existed in the first place, as both of these smithing geniuses lived a hundred years apart, but it is not beyond speculation to say that Muramasa was at least aware of Masamune's work.
Masamune's blades are of a legendary status in Japan, and are said to be the finest forged blades in history. There are a few Masamune blades left in the possession of the Japanese Royal family. The others have been lost, one in particular, the Honjo Masamune which was given to a United States Cavalry officer for safekeeping during WWII (I dunno why) and has since gone missing.
Muramasa's forged works are legendary as well, but in a much more infamous way. Muramasa swords are said to be cursed or bloodthirsty. It is said that, if drawn, a Muramasa blade must taste blood again before it can be returned to its sheath. Tokugawa Ieyasu outlawed the use and ownership of Muramasa blades because he had allegedly lost several friends and family members to these swords and had cut himself very badly upon the one that he personally owned.
Both of these master's swords have made various cameo appearances in a number of fictional works, but that's another entry altogether.
In any event, having been enthralled by the legends of both of these swordsmiths, I couldn't go ahead with releasing a gunblade named "Masamune" without also releasing a counterpart gunblade called "Masamune." Even if I did, I would feel something wasn't quite right, but that's just me.
Keeping with the idea that a Muramasa blade is cursed with a supernatural bloodthirst, I set about the task of designing a gunblade that could be the evil twin brother of Masamune. For the gun, I selected a SVI Infinity .45, which is a target competition, fully-customized variant of the trusty Colt 1911 .45. SVI Infinities were ridiculously popular with the airsoft community I was a part of in Hawaii, and the boxy, no-nonsense look of the gun, along with its myriad custom add-ons made this gun the total weapon of choice. Combine that with the fact that the .45 as a caliber has the definitional reputation as a man-stopping round, and you got the perfect bloodthirsty weapon.
The original Muramasa had a gun-metal black slide with glowing red inlays, but I had to alter the design due to scripting peculiarities that I won't get into here (this darker, red-inlay version appears in the video briefly at 0:42). I changed the slide to the silver sheen that was featured in the video above, and kept the frame of the gun gun-metal black. In the end, I may issue both versions of the gunblade in a fat pack. A friend even suggested doing a Hello Kitty-themed version of the Muramasa, complete with a pink slide. I think I will go through with it as a joke, but the punchline comes when someone pays for it.
