Check out the full progress photolog here. Or, if you've been in IRC, you've heard me talking about it non-stop for the past 2 months.

Wow. That's really impressive. How much longer until its finished?

I'm hoping to have it finished by March 1st.

awesome

Of course the real difficulty is going to be getting a Xen crystal to power it.

FelixGriffin wrote:
Of course the real difficulty is going to be getting a Xen crystal to power it.

Why do people think the gravity gun is powered by xen crystals? Is there some official source that says this? Throughout the entire narrative of the HL series, the xen crystals have always been tied to teleportation technology. The reactor in HL1, in the Nihilanth's chamber (he draws from them when he shoots the teleporter beam thing), the rotato in Kleiner's lab, the full scale teleporter in Black Mesa East. I realize they are kind of the macguffin that drives part of the narrative in this weird fringe way. But at no point are they ever shown to have any sort of gravity affecting ability.

Beyond that, "zero point energy" is a real thing. In the movie The Incredibles, the main villain has zero point energy weapons which function almost identically to how the gravity gun works too, and is much more based on the realistic application of zero point energy.

Stylistically, I've always thought the Gravity Gun looks like these:

Which, if you're not a Stargate fan, they're zero point modules, a type of power source. They're golden crystalline batteries, basically. I'd have to go and see when the first reference to the ZPMs in Stargate is but I'm pretty sure it was before HL2 came out. And lest we forget, originally the Gravity Gun was going to be blue from the get-go.

I always just assumed it was a Xen crystal because of the similar graphics (this vs. this), although that might be because of the limited number of ways to make something look "sciency" in a game. But I never knew that zero-point energy was a real term, I had thought it was just technobabble like on the portal gun diagrams. Now I have to go research that a bit...

I will agree that the HL1 xen crystals look similar to the HL2 gravity gun. However, go back and investigate the HL2 xen crystals. It's most obvious in Eli's lab, it's the crystal material in the big container with the controls to rotate it, on the wall opposite of the telepad. It is very, very different looking from the HL1 counterpart but almost certainly due to increases in graphics quality (a good analogue is the vortigaunts in HL1 and HL2), but it's most certainly a xen crystal based on the material name.

This one? You're right, the wiki also calls it a Xen crystal in the article on Black Mesa East.

Yup, that's it. If you follow the architecture in that map, the energy it emits is a component to the BME teleporter.

This weekend's work results.

The progress is coming along great! I'm really curious how you would go about doing something like this, how would you go about starting creating prop replicas and such?

It's a bit of an involved process. Originally I found an HD model of the gravity gun (though I later found out that it was a fan rebuild of the existing first person view weapon for a world model, where they copied and/or rebuilt the deleted faces). Because I was going to 3D print most of it, I had to re-make the entire model, using the game model as reference. I also was going to laser cut the front parts, so after I built the model and determined what size it would be in real life, I started working on 2D vector images for the laser cut parts.

Are you going to use those flowers on the gravity gun?

I highly recommend it.

Nice! Much better off building one from scratch then ordering a NECA one. Knowing Neca, it's 140 dollars for something that will be released only in limited quantities, and be released three more times in slightly different varieties.. Plus shipping. Completing things like these make you feel accomplished as well. I've got access to a 3D printer, I might try making a Portal gun sometime.

Starting to look like a Gravity Gun finally!

npc_msleeper_boss wrote:
Starting to look like a Gravity Gun finally!

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WOAH... looking awesome msleeper!

Can't comment right now, I gotta clean up pieces of my blown mind. Really though, that is amazing!

Very nice! Can't wait to see the final product

I'm still trying to find any decent shots, I pulled the typical "too busy to take any pictures of myself" so I'll have to borrow a friend's DSLR to get some good ones of my own. In the meantime I stopped in the Hyatt ladies room and took what I am titling, "the Gravity Gun in unifitting locations".