3D printing a Thorn hand cannon (Destiny)

A Bungie team member by the name of Sloan Hood recently designed his very own 3D printed Thorn hand cannon from the Destiny universe to match his uber-realistic Hunter threads.

“Destiny is a costume/prop-maker’s dream. There’s such a wide variety of awesome things to make, from the hard-surface armor of the Titan, to the fabric-based garb of the Warlock,” Hood told the official Bungie blog.

“I chose the Hunter because it’s a mix of the other two classes. There’s a bit of armor, and a bit of fabric. I also chose the Hunter because that’s the class I like to play. Quick, sneaky, lethal.”

According to Sloan, the Thorn hand cannon was 3D printed from actual assets created by Bungie’s hard-surface artists.

“I had to cut up the original models so that they had a flat surface from which the printer could begin printing,” Sloan explained.

“Cutting and capping hi-poly models with up to a million triangles can be a pretty arduous task. I also had to make sure the scale of each piece was correct.”

Once Sloan had ported a gun from the last safe city on Earth into Bellevue, there was an adjustment or two that needed be made before his hand cannon was ready.

“The first prints of the Thorn looked awesome, but a fellow artist who knows guns pointed out that the grip was way too small and was not quite the right shape.”

The subsequent iteration? Well, let’s just the final version of the prop would make any cosplayer follow Sloan on a dangerous mission into the wild.

“For the next few years, I may just play real-life Destiny and ‘level-up’ my existing armor and weapons,” he said. “Of course, I’ll have to make all that epic loot myself!”

For the uninitiated, Destiny is an upcoming action role-playing first-person shooter video game set in an open sci-fi world. The long-awaited title is slated to go live on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One September 9, 2014.