Alien Subject: SCP-09 - Sentry Gun

It's been a very long week. A week spent living in labs and seeing very little of the sun in an attempt to get ahead with the project but the closest I've seemed to manage is on track, somewhat at least. I was hoping to be ready to get fully set up in Unreal next week but the long process of texturing looks to be impeding on those plans. 

The modelling itself was relatively simple and only took a few days thanks to using splines to get a lot the organic shapes quickly and easily like the piping and the bend of the neck. The legs on the base were quick and easy too by modelling one and using the array tool to create instances that were uniformly spread out as a bonus. I intended for the design to be a creature that was metallic and organic parts spliced together so I kept the parts I would be texturing as flesh slightly asymmetrical.

I've spent a bit of time using Zbrush for adding detail such as texture to the skin. I used the feature in the program to apply the basic texture map so I could see the areas that would be alphaed out in the final model as was able to work around them.

To produce the normal map I exported out parts of the model that I wanted to detail, since the UVs of the legs of the base were overlaying I only needed to work on one of them. After re-importing the hi polys and using the projection modifier there were problems with the overlapping objects interfering with the normals of other objects so I had to bake out each piece individually and reconstruct the single map over in Photoshop. 

Since the design was for a bio-mechanical creature I tired to use the textures to keep these parts separate, keeping all the metals a fairly similar grey and using a particular purple for parts that would be classed as a shell or an exoskeleton and the lighter colours for the organic skin. I was hoping this in combination with the metalness and roughness map would create very obvious contrasts between the materials.

Albedo and Metalness maps

There is still some work to do in regards to texturing next week like the roughness map but I hope to get that out of the way fairly quickly and get onto the engine work. I've already imported the assets into engine for a dummy run and there were a few issues with the pivots that need some fine tuning but it doesn't seem like too much trouble at this point.