"Healing is just a hobby."


A fancy medigun made using the torso of a large marionette. The original marionette was split and hollowed out to make room for the medigun components. The arm and leg holes were capped using large rubber stoppers, and the head and bottom of the marionette now expel healing and receive medigun fuel respectively. Best not to think too much about it. The front of the medigun sports a special copper/iron cap that lengthens the barrel and splits the beam, potentially modifying the properties of the healing energy produced by the device. Near the grip is a special switch that controls how much energy to push through the medigun.

Potentially the first weapon I ever designed, the Limewood Leg-Up had concept art before I even booted Blender for the first time. This was back in 2012, and I wasn't confident enough to tackle the idea at the time. I put it off, and decided to come back when I felt I had a better understanding of the creation process. This turned out to be a good idea, since the weapons that followed proved to be very challenging, and turned out very poorly. I felt it was pretty overdue at this point.

The original concept for this weapon(and all of the Medic weapons in this set) were very heavily puppet-themed in their first iteration, pretty much to a fault. The old design had flaps that would open up when you pulled on the lever, and had an intricate web of strings that would move different components around while the Medigun was active. The middle had a Portal-gun-esqe core that would spin when you ubercharged. Maybe that'd be cool in some other game, but simplicity really is a virtue in TF2. Just like the puppet cross, I removed a large amount of the obnoxious puppet stuff.

The backpack was a bit of an after thought. I wanted to aim for something that was simple, readable, and elegant. I drew heavy inspiration from the original medigun backpack for this. The copper coils came late in, but after seeing how striking the effect is, I went back through and reworked some of the dingy metal plate on the backpack and gun to use a smooth copper finish instead. I feel like it adds a bit of sleek character to the overall design.

The particle beam was also something I was hesitant to attempt. If you've ever messed with Source Engine's particle editor, then you likely know what an airplane dashboard it can be at times. It took two whole days to refine the effect down to something that was appealing. The idea here is that the Limewood splits the beam at the copper cap, producing four strands of energy in the process, which reconnect with the beam further down the line. The beam also stretches a bit further, to simulate a longer healing range. When viewed from the side, it looks like an inverted candle flame. This effect is not implemented in game, as I could not figure out a way to actually hook it up to the default medigun beam without breaking a ton of stuff.

Finally, the fan on the backpack actually spins. It uses passive animation, and will spin automatically whenever the backpack is used.

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[gamebanana.com]