Week 7: Turret Post-Mortem

The turret project is almost complete, with the hand-in tomorrow and I am beginning to notice a common theme between projects now; things just are not going to plan. This week has left me once again feeling like I have taken a swift kick between the legs. I was also going to use this post to display all my awesome knowledge I gained in blueprint, sadly blueprint is harder than it looks and I struggled heavily with it but I will show some of the things I managed to figure out.

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.

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. 

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.

Z-Brush sculpts

My Z-Brush Process

1. Create base model in Max, making sure the normals and smoothing groups are all okay.
2. Unwrap it.
3. Divide the base model into separate attachments, these will become sub-tools in Z-Brush which will make things easier.
4. Make a copy of the base model and make it high poly! Use edge-loops and turbosmooth (with the smoothing groups option).
5. Check the normals again (This could have been one of my big problems).
6. Export the model as an .obj and import it in Z-Brush.
7. Split the tool to create subtools, which makes things so much easier.
8. 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)
9. Once done, export the tool. Use the Decimation Master Zplugin if the tool has an insane amount of tris.
10. 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.

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.

UE4 Screengrabs

UE4 Material Help

Glass

Quick bump map increase

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?!

Week 6: Z-Brush

I mentioned last week that I wanted to get into Z-Brush, well, the last few days that is exactly what I have done and after a few stressful hours I have finally managed to create something that I am happy with.

The week had me start with finishing my base model from the week before and testing it in engine. I wanted to make sure it worked before I moved any further and thankfully it works fine with the skeleton. I will need to make adjustments though, like making it fire from both barrels. I have then spent the rest of the week fighting inside Z-Brush as I tried to get use to the unique way the program handles itself.

Final turret design

Turret base mesh - 5,000 tris

I found that many of the tutorials for Z-Brush like to focus on sculpting a super-awesome rock dinosaur robot and the process behind that, which is great for when I'm ready to tackle something like that but at the moment is pretty useless. Simpler, beginner tutorials appear to be pretty difficult to find. This just slowed me down, as I began smashing buttons and trying things out myself and eventually after a number of failed attempts I began to have positive results.

This might actually look like I know what I am doing in Z-Brush

There were plenty of tutorials videos on  the actual baking down process though, which was great. Below is the bump map of my various bakes. The massive gaps are because I didn't do high poly bakes for every part of my turret, these will be filled in with bumps from textures. Being new to Z-Brush I wanted to keep things a little simple.

Next week is when I plan on getting the turret working in engine properly and I will be making a bigger blog post about it, where I'll be noting down everything I pick up on to make it work. This will hopefully serve as a good resource for me if I ever need to reuse something from this project. Below I have linked the final look of the Viking room we created, as a group, during the first week back. I have been meaning to post it up but every time I have forgotten about it! I concepted the bench, modeled the hog's head, unwrapped the shield and textured the barrel! I also made the rug as an extra. For now that is me done, I need a break from this turret and more importantly Z-Brush!

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.