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.  

Project Post-mortem

A lot went on with the film room project and as a bonus we broke the sun. So this is something to sum up the project and how I think we managed.

Initially, like a lot of groups this project didn't kick off well for us. Even with lighting problems and data lose picking a room to work with was still the biggest headache by far, it took a long time to sort something suitable and suitable in this case mostly meant interesting and achievable.

Concepting wasn't really given the attention it deserved, since we were working with already established designs we didn't really allocate official time into our planning for the concept work despite knowing how important this step is, a lot more time and effort will be going into this from now on.

There were several improvements I could have made to my work I feel. The bar asset for a start even after remodelling it had a quite noticeable difference in size of the red part of the underside of it. This causes a noticeable difference in our image to the original once we set the camera angle.    While I’m happy with my work with the emissive material the colours of the signs needed some adjustment such as the red in the sign on the window was much too light and would have benefited from being darkened. Finally the outside scene I was not particularly pleased with, it was interesting to see what could be achieved with just normal maps, smoothing groups and metalness maps such as with the center building but the basic geometry I used is still quite evidently basic geometry. It’s texture could have also benefited from a little more time working with it to try and take away some of the look of blocky colours.

Overall I am happy with the project, the team worked well together and people worked hard. There where a few issues with our finished scene that didn't match up with our image

-Emissive lights in the dividers and walls were too yellow

-The outside buildings looked like they were too far away

-The perspective of the camera was not completely correct

-The shots didn't line up exactly

We had hoped to address these issues but a data loss and lighting problem meant we had to prioritise recreating the scene again.

While our teamwork was overall good in my eyes it did seem Thomas ended up doing a lot more work with modelling and engine as all the assets had to be added into his building scene. It would have been better for the rest of us to have been able to pick up some of his work load.

"Sharn, we've got some bad news...."

I made a rookie mistake with my last blog post, I said the project was going well and we were on schedule and nearly finished which naturally opened the flood gates for disaster.

On Monday afternoon having just finished explaining to a tutor how well everything seemed to be going the rest of the team appeared with excellent comedic timing to tell me that it had broken.

Nobody knows what happened but the short version of the problem is we lost the sun, no idea where it went and it didn't have any intention of coming back. Having left Unreal 4 idle and to it's own devices for a few moments it seemed to have misplaced the skybox which was a fairly big problem to begin with but this also broke the lighting we had set up in scene and turned the metal textures black again. In the end the only option we had was to rebuild the scene in a new file. On this day we learnt a valuable lesson about backing up files.

On the plus side when we did rebuild it the bar fit in a lot easier with the new remodelled version, the with the improved UV unwrap the textures didn't blur and stretch on the model and this also left me with room to dedicate more space to the part of the counter that would have the shared bump map with other metallic objects so that stopped looking completely awful. Also while looking at the original scene idea I noticed that the far end of the bar was capped off by an extra piece of the counter that was actually fairly visible so I modelled and added into the asset as well. 

Looking at the version I had and the remodelled version it's quite clear what the problems we were having with this model were caused by, those original corners are pretty poorly made. The bend modifier had been giving me a lot of trouble so at the time achieving those curves had been a victory but returning to this modifier for the remodel I had a bit of a eureka moment and realised a simple solution had been staring me in the face, so I moved the pivot point a few centimetres and it was fixed.





As you can image this week had suddenly become very busy so when the sun left he took my earlier plans to work with blueprints with him but while that had to be taken off the table I was once again troubleshooting in the material editor when connecting up sign texture in scene provided a new hurdle. Since the material was a shared texture sheet and a lot of information in it was controlled by the Albedo map such as the emissive colour we had a few problems with glowing windows which were just a little more than noticeable. So I set about getting a mask working within the material. I'm not actually too sure about how technically accurate it is as far as materials go but it did the job I wanted so at least it's not wrong.

So in the end, the end being 9PM the night before hand in, the scene was up and running again but we couldn't quite get the lighting and camera angle back to the level we were happy with like on the original file so it was never going to match up perfectly with the film still but it came out alright all the same and in terms of group work the project was a success in my eyes, everyone did their part and more and we produced a finished scene, twice technically. I've really enjoyed this project more so that I thought I would, the team aspect made working a lot more fun and kept me motivated, I'm sad to hand it in and move onto the solo sentry gun project.

So this is the final scene we ended up with. There are lots of improvements that could be made, as I mentioned the lighting and our camera angle isn't quite right. My textures on the street outside also look a lot plainer and block colour than I'd like there are also a couple of errors on the texture that slipped by our notice until we were staring at it on the presentation screen. Again, not perfect but we did alright.

Go team!

It’s been a busy week for the group, 10 – 9 stretches in the labs, problems with perspective and asset sizing and an unholy list of bad puns in an attempt to settle on a team name but by Friday night we had something to show for it, a scene in engine with the main bulk of its assets in place.

We still have a few things to do, some more assets need completing, some changes need to be made to existing ones including the bar I made which needs a remodel on the curve to fit the scene. I’ve also noticed a few problems with it I want to address while I’m there and finally of course, the lighting needs building.

Having gotten a fair bit of our stuff in engine on the Friday we’re working a little bit ahead of schedule which has given use a small window of time to go back and improve the accuracy of the models.

I started working in engine a little earlier than everyone else to get the neon signs working but in having achieved that I seem to have been dubbed ‘the closest to a lighting expert we have’, this isn't even close to true considering the signs use emissive textures and not lights but eager to remain helpful this weekend has been a crash course in lighting and using Blueprints in Unreal 4.

Searching the internet didn't turn up a lot of information or tutorials for what I was looking for so through trial and error and a rehashed UDK set up I managed to create a material that flickers for the sign in the window. The original set up had a second branch connected to it which causes more variation in the flicker but the result seems a bit too fast and excessive so it was simplified again.

I also sent this week working on my third task for the scene which was the outside view from the window. Originally we'd intended to have this part be just two painted planes but with room in the budget we decided that creating some simple geometry would be preferable so be able to capture shadows and a sense of depth that wouldn't be achievable with a flat image.   

It was interesting to see what could be achieved with just smoothing groups and normal maps but there where still issues with this approach such as our view from the original image window was blocked by characters so there was a lot of estimating. The box geometry was useful for this too, with the ability to move the position of the buildings we were able to make adjustments to try and force the perspective to match the image.

So far our group work has been going well, everyone has been working well together and we're pleased with the results so far and we're hoping to be finished very soon. 

Week 2: Dex's Diner

This week was all movie surfing and mood boards, endless mood boards. With the Asset swap completed everyone moved full time to the next which was the "Film Room".

"Exhibit A"

The target for this project is to recreate a film still of a room from a movie, matching perspective, assets, style and importantly the lighting. The largest hurdle we've faced so far is picking a room to work with, after the groups were enlightened about brown and green colour palettes last week there's seems to have been a mass attempt to go out and find the most colourful films imaginable seemingly to the point of madness with some. By the end of the week the tutors goals of getting us to think more about our palettes was pretty much realised and at some stages, obsessively so.


Eventually, this was the scene we landed on.

Dex's Diner, from Star Wars attack of the clones. There were a lot of factors to take into account that led this to being our selection but we thought it would be a good scene to work with even with the problems we might face with the perspective.

Starting with work load, all the scenes we collected either provided too little work for our group of five, or too much. This room is full of repeating assets meaning only one of them would need making. With the scene divided up among the group each person is only required to produce one large asset and two small ones apart from the person making the building structure, since it's a fairly large and complex job it will be their only modelling task. My own tasks consists of creating the bar counter, the neon signs and the outdoor view.

Since a large part of this project is looking at lighting we also thought this scene would be useful to work with as it is lit by such a large natural light but also has the influence of artificial ones which would force us to work harder with and gain a better understanding of Unreal 4 if we wanted to get it working.

Not ignoring the fact it's also cool, because diners are cool. They were cool in Hopper's Nighthawks and they're cooler when you put them in space. If we're recreating something then lets recreate something interesting.

Overall this week as we get into our modelling work I'm surprised to find how much I'm enjoying group projects, everyone learns quickly from each other and because of that each member of our group is coming away from these projects with a handful of useful tricks and skills they've picked up from someone. For someone like me who likes to keep to myself it is a very strange sensation to be eager to take part in the group. I was expecting and dreading the second term big group project but these smaller ones have been a huge help. Thanks course restructure!