Week 5: Sentry Gun Project

It's much harder coming out of group work than I expected it to be, motivation is a lot scarcer when you're working on a project solo. Our next project is the Sentry Gun, taking a Unreal Blueprint for a gun we have free rein of the design as long as it has the four required components, so the 'Gun', the 'Barrel', the 'Yaw' and the 'Base' other than those we can pretty much go crazy.

While a lot of people seem to enjoy this freedom I'm usually happier with a more set in stone brief so I don't spent hours lost in hopeless confusion or possibilities or to keep me from going completely off the deep end. Luckily, Tuesday's class kicked us off with a lesson on 'Bash kits' though my page at the end of it was more so just a mess of silhouettes rather than a recognisable kit of any kind. Regardless I managed to throw some gun like objects together as a starting point and took note of the designs people were leaning towards when I asked for their opinions and selected six of these that I liked to keep working with. For a process that was meant to be rapid idea generation I know I spent fair too long on this stage. I've planned a week for each stage of the project so concepting, modelling and engine work and by the end of the first week I'm a little bit behind with things but I have the information I need to move onto the next stage so I hope to get some time to come back to it.

I went with a particularly organic design since I saw the potential in the shape to look into insects and other critters to develop the idea further and it started to come out very alien, whether this was a coincidence or my love of sci-fi subconsciously slipping me ideas I don't really know but at the orthographic stage my little sentry gun and I were in this together so there would be few drastic design changes if we could avoid it.   

With the orthos done I'm set for sending the next week modelling and here's hoping 3D Studio is in a good enough mood to let it go smoothly.