Sentry Gun's final week

As the deadline passes its time to say goodbye to the Sentry Gun at least until we revisit it after Christmas. It's been a fun project and since I'm not completely overjoyed to see the back of it I take that as a sign that it went quite well even if the last week did start to cut it close. There's been a lot of back are fourth between 3Ds Max and Unreal these past few days trying to get the pivots to sit right thanks to a few errors in my modelling for the base but that sort of got worked out in the end.

There was also some finishing up of the texture maps trying to iron out some of the weaker aspects of them, I didn't quite get them to what I wanted but I'd pushed the time I had to spend on texturing to the limit and it was time to move on. It was quick job to model and texture a projectile to work with the gun. The idea behind my gun design was a sentient insect creature that had been spliced into mechanical parts, to try and stick with this I made the projectile as a type of toxic stinger so unlike most sentry guns the danger of getting hit by it isn't immediate.

With everything I needed it was back into Unreal to finally get it firing. After adding a socket for the weapon fire I had to remove the collision mesh on the barrel to get the projectile to spawn correctly. I also made a few changes to the settings in the blueprint to remove the ejection port and slow down the right of fire,  reduced the angle of the yaw slightly to stop the gun pulling back too far and clearly detaching from the base.

In an attempt to keep working with my design of the gun being alive and sentient I connected up the emissive texture on the ammo dispenser and in the barrel to pulse, trying get something that looked like it could be breathing. Unfortunately there was a slight delay in fade in and out which I didn't have time to attempt to correct so I didn't fully get this effect I wanted.

In the last bit of my time I created a quick effect to switch out with the default red star for the mussel flash. We're due to revisit this aspect of the project after Christmas but it was a quick and simple change just so it had something a bit more organic and that fit with the colour scheme. As a final extra I connected up a sound cue to the weapon fire to generate a sort of spiting sound when the projectile spawns.

I'm happy with the finished model over all though I think I may have let my love of science fiction have more say that it should have and the longer I stare at the design the more generic alien it looks to me. Still, I'm glad I went with the organic design, I think it was a lot more fun to work than a mechanical gun would have been and the shape wouldn't have been nearly as interesting to model.