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.

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.

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.