SIGNALIS Fan Art: BW-5 "Nitro Express" Rifle

Short project I did over about a month. Signalis has become one of my favorite indie games I've played, with one of its most captivating aspects for me being the design language of the technology. The guns in particular are extremely unique, drawing from real-world firearms but with just the right amount of fictional detail and sci-fi sensibilities. The BW-5 is a lovely looking gun with roots in late 19th century hunting rifles and "elephant guns", so I wanted to try my hand at recreating it and it's associated "Nitro Express" cartridge.

I wanted to come up with something that was extremely faithful to the spirit of the original design whilst pushing particular details to a high bar of realism. I tried to refine certain areas in such a way that justified the astronomical jump in texture resolution from the game's unfiltered PS1-esque limitations. This meant ideating a lot of custom logography, edge wear, decals, and surface profiling that wouldn't feel out of place in the game's universe. To me, this felt like an effective method of bringing the gun's design to modern standards whilst still adhering to its original look.

All credit goes to rose-engine for the BW-5's original design, model geometry, and world of SIGNALIS.