Showing posts with label sentry gun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sentry gun. Show all posts

Saturday, 15 November 2014

So I'm currently in the final week of the sentry gun project, and I'm not too worried. Which is worrying. The majority of Monday and Tuesday were spent texturing and making sure everything works properly and looks pretty in engine. Due to wanting the pitch to be fairly smooth, I put the majority of the detail - such as scratches - on the roughness map which achieved the desired effect so there was no need to create a normal map. Remember the last time I was using alphas in UE4? Yep. I've had the same issue and the parts I wanted semi-transparent have just completely vanished. This hasn't bothered me too much as I was planning on creating a glass material in UE4 anyway but it seems to be a recurring issue so I'd quite like to find out what the cause is. It's probably me being a total idiot, as per. I HAVE PINK GLASS BUBBLES NOW. Soooooo much cooler than an alpha.

Ooooooo pink bubbles
The rest of the week was spent fiddling about with UE4 and trying out different methods of animating the emissive maps! After asking around my group, I had some help from Mark and he showed me a really simple way of animating that was easy to control.



Just as I was about to take some pretty renders. I noticed this. Argh. See, I said I was an idiot! Back to Max we go.

Smoothing groups blergh.
On Tuesday we all got set the surprise task of making a poster to advertise our guns. Again, I fell into the Pinterest pit and probably sat staring at retro and American Propaganda posters for a good 3 hours. If I'm doing it for university work it's not procrastination, right? After making another huge and colourful moodboard, I started the concepts. I'm not going to bore you with the whole process again, so I'll just post the pre-finals.


So as well as reaching the stretch goal I'd set myself, I also did a little bit of extra work in the labs on Saturday. I decided to add a sound to my gun to make it 'fit' the style more! This was also much simpler than what I thought it was going to be, even though blueprints were involved. Ehhhhh. I actually managed to get the whole project finished then too so here's a couple of final renders!



I've also been set a super awesome new project that I'm absolutely ecstatic about and I just want to start it now! I've got to design two dichotomy characters that can be in any style and the best part is...I get to set my own tri count! I'm slightly scared by this as I've always had a strict limit to work to before and I'm worried I might fall into the trap of "oh I've gone over by 150...never mind I'll just change the budget...". I plan to have my sentry gun finished and have all of the final renders done by Saturday so I can get stuck into the character project as soon as I get up on Sunday. I'm literally having to force myself not to start pinning cool stuff already...
Week 7: Posters & Even More Poker Chips!
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Week 7: Posters & Even More Poker Chips!

Sunday, 9 November 2014

Okay so this year is going past way too quickly for my liking. How is it week 6 already!?

Week 6 is what the university call an 'employability week'. Ha. For us game art people that's just more time to make the sentry gun. Awwww yiss. However, week 6 is also the launch of the Leicester Media School so on Wednesday we had a visit from the Vice Chancellor and various other cool and  important people that were around the building for most of the day looking at the work we've been doing. Pretty scary but it went well. I think. We also had a life drawing lesson on - instead of having the usual nude model, one of the third years was modelling some absolutely awesome costumes!

Due to not having any of the usual lessons on, this meant I had a lot of time to get the final model of my sentry gun finished. I've still got a few bits that I'm not 100% keen on so I'm going to try and play around with it a bit more to get it up to scratch.
The basic block out I did also worked pretty well in UE4, despite firing from the wrong end of the barrel... Oh, pivots. The worst thing is that everyone I've spoken to is encountering the same issue and we don't really know how to fix it. Wahhh.

WHAT IS GOING ON :(
At least now I know it *kind of* works in engine so I can finally get on with unwrapping and texturing! I'm trying to leave myself as much time as possible to play around with emissive maps and animating them to try and reach the stretch goal I've set myself.

I also managed to get the card model finished this week too! I didn't really enjoy making these last year - possibly due to the ridiculously awful clay I was using - but I really enjoyed this one and I just want to make loads of them now.


If I've got enough time left towards the end of this project, I'd quite like to have a go modelling this with Sculpy rather than having a mass of Sellotape. Another stretch goal maybe?

I mentioned earlier about the issues I was having with the barrel. FIXED IT. Aww yiss. I realised that I hadn't moved/placed a socket - oops.

I got all of the unwrapping done on Thursday and finally finished packing it on Friday evening so I've spent the whole weekend painting poker chips. I may have also accidentally read the brief wrong and put the projectile on the same sheet, so I had to pack everything all over again...oh well, practice makes things look better! I hope.





Week 6: Painting Poker Chips
07:54

Week 6: Painting Poker Chips

Wednesday, 5 November 2014

So the film project has come to an end, and the start of a new 'sentry' begins. Ha. I'm also super sorry that is post is like, 3/4 days late. Halloween took over.

Moodboard 1
More detailed moodboard. Yay.
The project was announced on Monday and we've got to design/model/animate a sentry gun - sounds awesome already! Due to finishing the film project on Thursday, I started making a board on Pinterest full of weird and wonderful things to help me with concepts. These ranged from Art Deco appliances & ray guns, to poker chips & neon lights. I managed to sneak a few Cacti in there too. From the images I'd found on Pinterest, I started creating a mini bash kit. I lassoed all of the shapes I found interesting and blocked them out using flat colours and quite literally bashed them together in interesting compositions. Here's the bash kit I produced: 


And here's the guns I managed to get out of it:


Due to the shapes I've got in the kit, they all seem like retro 'War of the Worlds' meets super tacky. So basically what I was trying to achieve...I then had the task of choosing which ones to iterate on, which wasn't too hard as I wasn't keen on the majority of them. I found myself quite stuck on the iteration stage though because I already quite liked the designs I had so this was a bit arghhhhh. Therefore they all look a bit similar, welp.


I gathered opinions from my classmates on which idea to take into 3DS Max and got stuck into modelling ASAP. The mock-up took me about an hour, but it was extremely useful to produce clown/AO renders from to paint over and also to experiment with how the pivots will work in UE4.


I did a couple of quick paint overs (as shown below) and tried to settle on a final theme. I decided to go with the War of the Worlds/Vegas casino idea that shoots poker chips. Woo. This also led to a hell of a lot of research into emissive maps so I know I'm not going to fall into the trap of having no idea what I'm doing. I hope.



Anyway, here's the final concept. I'm quite excited about where this is going as we've been given so much freedom which is pretty awesome! The emissive side of things is worrying me as I want to try and animate the lights, but at the moment that's only a stretch goal so I'm trying not to fuss over it too much.

Final design WIP
Enough about guns, the rest of the week consisted of spontaneous presentations and super cool - cool shit Wednesday's. One of the current third years came in to talk to us about the BMW internship he's currently doing. Thursday we had an unexpected presentation in which we had to present the post mortems we wrote...soooo, um. Presentations aren't fun. Unfortunately there wasn't enough time in the allocated session for us all to present, so it was somewhat relieving but also sad at the same time cause I would've liked to have seen the various issues people encountered along the way.
Week 5: Sentry Guns, Puns & Halloween
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Week 5: Sentry Guns, Puns & Halloween