Week 5: Sentry Turrets.

The third project is, as you can probably guess by the title, all about sentry turrets and we've been working on it for roughly a week now. I can't tell if all the group work has made me really grateful about a solo assignment or if this project is just ticking all the right boxes but I've so far been enjoying the Sentry Turret a lot!

A sentry turret is basically a self-operated, stationary gun that will normally be protecting a corridor or some high value objective [1]

This assignments final outcome is a sentry turret that tracks the player in UE4, and fires. We've been given a skeleton base to rig it with but apart from that we have complete creative freedom, which sounds great but when you get down to putting something on paper it suddenly becomes quite daunting. In one of our lectures we were shown a way to overcome this hurdle with a few randomizing techniques and I put them to good use because I knew I'd fall into the same old trap of doing some post-apocalyptic snore turret.

After some random word generation and a dice roll for the time period a theme was chosen, a late 19th Century Russian poison vodka turret. I found this particularly interesting because it bypasses the now stereotypical view of a Soviet Russia. Having an idea I started working with some moodboards.

For an extra challenge we also had to splice an interesting object into our turrets, last time I did this I chose a mini-wheelie bin which made it much harder than it needed to be, so this time I went on the hunt for an actual interesting object! I soon found 2 objects, one was a toy train from a kids meal and the other was... something that caught my eye while I was looking around Leicester market... I'm sure you'll know what it is.

The toy train and "smoking appliance"

The entire concept design process is still something that I am learning but with a helpful lecture on creating silhouettes I had a blast during the early stages of design, which has so far made everything else more enjoyable too. I started with a bashkit to build up some silhouettes and iterated from there.

The only part that I struggled with was towards the end of the process when it come to picking a final design. My head couldn't fully figure how these  flat silhouettes would work in a 3D space, which is why I started adding values then had to stop to build this turret in 3D. To help speed up the perspective (and make sure it was correct) I built a quick mesh in 3DS Max. This did take a few attempts but the end results I think are very strong and I am now in the process of combining the different aspects that I like into a final design, and I should then be able to begin modelling.

I managed to look into Z-Brush and it's clear that the program will require more than a weekend to get my head around, but it would really help with this project, especially with all the filigree. Forza Horizon 2 is still keeping me busy, to the point that I've only bought 1 game in the Steam Halloween sale, and I've also done another update to the blogs background, but I can't tell if it's effecting my eyes while reading  so I might need to have a rethink about it.


Notes & References
[1] Turrets from Team Fortress 2 & Portal, both created by Valve.