Week 7

Sentry Gun Overview

This was a fairly simple project, the hardest part was taking all my melting pot ideas into one gun, I feel it worked out well in the end. The first part was research and I picked pastel goth and diesel punk as my themes. To make the work I took mechanical but rounded shapes, made a bash kit and started working. The outcome was suitably diesel fuelled and so I made the colours, details and feel for the turret more pastel goth. The whole thing turned out a lot better than I thought it would.
Next I moved on to modelling, this wasn’t hard but not as difficult as I had thought the blimp like back end would be ethier so all good there. The unwrap could have been better, I didn’t know how I was going to recreate my ideas so there are parts I would change. Eg: the separated ID’s could have left more space for my other parts and got more space themselves, however as is they could share the same roughness maps.

The poster i made for the graphic side of project.

Engine was a lot of fun and experimenting, especially with textures and my new toy the Lerp node.

I’m really pleased with most the topology on this project, I tried to get it to flow well and use my large 5000 tri budget efficiently all across the model. Some of the wires look similar and would share texture space, but I didn’t want smearing so I had to lay the over each other rather than reassign verts as I normally would.

My projectile was an eye ball, I’m really happy with how the normal map pumps up the veins, and it’s also really well fitted for my gun.

Using blue Prints to get the double barrel working.



Learning about lerps, I love lerps, I used several on the glass to give it hue and opacity (glass material above). Lerps are also what gives the gun a purple pearlesance and that’s perfect for the look of my turret. I feel it looks less toy like because of the lerps.

I also did a little paint over to show what I would change, in this case I would make the purple glow out the back reflect off the metal more.

I’ve really love learning about texture map and how I can use I’Ds in max to swap out and become engine textures, which are not part of my texture budget, so that’s really useful. I also love the way that Lerps work and I may have gone overboard with them. However I think if I went back once again my concepts weren't up to scratch and I should have shown my progression more. I got some feedback that my pivot was too thin (oddly balanced I think they meant) but didn’t have time to re unwrap and change that so that was a shame. I looked at my idea and changed parts and did a lot of working out with how I would create this gun in 3D, but I seem to not have shown these processes anywhere, nor have I shown how I went back into the albedo and added more details and scratches and decals. Which is a shame because it was a part of how this developed. Overall I’m happy with my result and it’s a project that I would like to revisit and add more too, eg: animated eyeballs flowing through the tubes like they were meant to, but I couldn't work out in time.

In engine shots of my pastel punk diesel gun