DMUGA Week 6 - A whole week to focus on our projects?!... Yes please! :)

So, we enter the 2nd week of our sentry gun project and I am off to a good start with the modelling. There are so many things I want to do during this assignment, e.g. The 'clown' render - render different parts in simple colours and use them to make selections and paint over them in Photoshop. I want to do sculpting to some extent in Z-Brush and bake the normals onto the low poly mesh. In addition, I'd like to get a somewhat decent paint-over/conceptual drawing of my sentry gun as opposed to just the idea sketches. It'll be a good solid week, I just hope to get the things I have in mind done so I can think about the additions listed above for the final week.

From Monday to Tuesday, both days were literally taken up by the modelling. This wouldn't have taken as long if I didn't have a problem with the tri-count. I have a rather organic shape, therefore I need to use my tris very smartly indefinitely to get the shape I want, and still be within the budget. The problem I had was that the legs, core, and body had a couple of edge loops which weren't entirely necessary for the silhouette I was going for. I did however have to get rid of the bottom 'ridges', but it was a sacrifice I had to make.

Before re-topology = 5963

After re-topology = 4963

Wednesday was the opening of the Leicester media school and we had a good time putting some of our work on show for whoever happened to be walking around that day. In terms of getting work done, I did manage to put it all into the game engine and test the function/firing of the sentry gun. Unfortunately it did take me the whole of Wednesday to unwrap it, as I spent an extended amount of time trying to get the UV's to tightly fit into the texture space.

Scorpion Sentry Unwrap

I had a few problems in the game engine as the scorpion sentry was ejecting the bullet cartridges rather nicely, but the actual bullets weren't being fired. Luckily, Max was around on Thursday to help me with this and apparently, it was the fact that the collision mesh on the barrel & body were interfering with the spawning of the bullet. To easily fix this, I just had to remove the collision meshes and it worked perfectly! By the end of Thursday, I had a partially textured but fully functioning Sentry gun.
I also had a quick play about with the physics of the ejected cartridge to try and get it falling a bit more realistically.

Friday involved finishing the textures to 70% and looking generally well. The only thing I did manage to do was make the roughness & normal maps for it.

Top right = Scorpion / Other 3 = Bullet Texture (SO FAR! - Just the base colour)

Overall, I'd say that I got a fair amount of work done but not as much as I wanted to because I aimed to have all of the texturing finished by the end of this week. I did have to take the weekend off though however as I spent my birthday with my family & friends, but it's back to work now and I'm looking forward to doing the final touches to my sentry gun!

My current aims for the following week are to:
-Get the texturing done
-Do a clown render & paintover/(s)
-Particle or sound effects (Stretch goal)
-Modelling in Z-brush + Baking the detail
-Perhaps play around with a more creative projectile (If time allows)