The Turret Design Process
The early stages of this project was fantastic for me, for once I had a great way to generate ideas and it was actually producing good results. I spent the time iterating on the design while also trying to incorporate my chosen splicing objects. Keeping the entire theme and style random was also a good way for me to explore areas of design that I would have never thought of.
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| Initial idea generation |
I maybe could have spliced the objects into my design much earlier to get even better results but this just meant I had another iteration chance. I became stuck when I reached the final 3, I needed to start imagining these flat silhouettes as 3D objects but I couldn't do it, so I had to take a design into a 3D format so I could make a solid final decision.
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| Final concept into orthographics |
To keep on track I decided to start the model earlier than normal. I wanted to try and create a nice final 2D piece, showing what the turret would have looked like in its environment but I thought I would set that as an end goal incase anything went wrong. It's a good job I did. I also skipped the entire colouring process in a bid to get ahead with the modelling side, I got away with doing it this once I think; I won't be doing it again though.
3DS Max & Z-Brush
This is where things began to go wrong. I made the base model with a few hundred tris to spare and then I got into Z-Brush, all the earlier time saving was because I knew I wanted to use Z-Brush. I spent a few days in tutorials trying to figure everything out and I eventually left Z-Brush with some okay results for baking. The entire process is still a bit confusing though so I am going to note it down for future reference below.
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| Z-Brush sculpts |
My Z-Brush Process
- Create base model in Max, making sure the normals and smoothing groups are all okay.
- Unwrap it.
- Divide the base model into separate attachments, these will become sub-tools in Z-Brush which will make things easier.
- Make a copy of the base model and make it high poly! Use edge-loops and turbosmooth (with the smoothing groups option).
- Check the normals again (This could have been one of my big problems).
- Export the model as an .obj and import it in Z-Brush.
- Split the tool to create subtools, which makes things so much easier.
- Before starting sculpting on a subtool Dynamesh it then divide, the number of divides depend on the object size (eg. a belt buckle won't need that many divides)
- Once done, export the tool. Use the Decimation Master Zplugin if the tool has an insane amount of tris.
- Import back into Max and bake!
Baking everything down is when it all broke. The bakes for whatever reason had huge, noticeable seams. I spent days trying to fix the problem, I must have baked each thing at least 15 times over trying little tweaks. Part of the problem I now realize was due to some poor unwrapping. I had the great idea to mirror as much as I could to increase texture space which lead to some very clear bump seams, so I redid the parts I could and hid a few others with geometry, like I should have from the beginning. The final model still has seams but the most noticeable ones are now hidden.
Texturing
My original schedule was now out the window, but I gave myself enough time to texture the model properly. Not doing a colour scheme earlier had slowed me down in places but overall things went smoothly until it came to dropping everything in engine.
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| Final 1024 texture sheets |
The large grey empty gap was meant to be for the glass bottle, used with an alpha to get the bottle label to show up. When in engine however, the translucent option broke my model by making all polygons to appear flipped or something similar. I made the decision to use a multi-sub, with a glass material being used for the second slot, this meant that my label and the bottle holder wouldn't be visible but I thought it looked much better than an ugly grey block.
I also placed the metalness and emissive textures in the RGB space to save resources, but looking at it now I could have thrown the roughness in there too.
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| UE4 Screengrabs |
UE4 Material Help
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| Glass |
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| Quick bump map increase |
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| Simple Glow |
Finishing Off
Originally I wanted a couple of days to mess around with Blueprint but in the end I just had one, where I manged to get both barrels to emit the firing particle and eject a cartridge. I couldn't figure out how to get the second barrel to actually fire or how to make the small crank rotate. Spending days staring at blueprint and trying to find tutorials has left me quite exhausted. Maybe just before hand-in I can quickly grab some help.
We had also been tasked with creating a promotional poster for our turret. I was a little nervous in creating this as I didn't know how much of my graphic design knowledge has actually stuck around in my head but I am really happy with the final result. I tried to keep with the theme of late 19th Century Russian by injecting a small amount of constructivism into the filigree.
Once again I am feeling a little underwhelmed with the end results after 3 weeks. Maybe I need an ambition check once and a while to scale myself back, I am pleased with how the turret looks but when parts of it don't work how I want it has left me dissatisfied. I also had to heavily cut back on the 2D side which is something I am not pleased about, I still might try and paint the turret in an environment, even if it doesn't get marked it will still be great practice. As for the next project, bring it on! What else could go wrong?!
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