Week Eight: My Finished Turret

So this is my sentry turret it’s… 

Yup it’s definitely a sentry turret.

So if you can tell I’m not really too happy with it. I purposely tried to focus on texturing on this project as I consider this to be the biggest issue I currently have in asset production. I feel that getting the silhouette correct, reducing the geometry down that doesn't affect the form and high quality texture detailing are the most important elements in asset production, and while I feel I can do the first two aims, I struggle with the latter one. I've tried to tackle texturing by giving myself a large amount of it to do, this at first might seem defeating. Why would you have a lot of texturing? Aren't you stretching yourself so thin? Well my thinking was, at the start of the first year we were taught the basics then told to model a 1500 tri dalek. We were literally thrown in and taught to learn it. My thinking was along these lines; If I have a lot of texture work, then I’d be forced to improve on texturing because of the amount of work I have to conquer. It’s forcing me to confront what I’m bad at and improve via the sheer work load. This way does have some really negative down sides to them, such as sheer amount of work. I have to produce an Albedo, Normal, High map, Roughness and metalness maps. As well as having a try with an ambient occlusion map which will have to be made by hand. The ambient occlusion can be created in both Unreal 4 and 3ds max, but due to the geometry being quite flat and most of the detail in the texturing, it has to be created by hand unless there’s a way I haven’t found out that I can do. I also have to be precise with my time management skills, which… I’m also not too good with, especially when the first part of this project was moving incredibly slow. With the concepting taking over a week and struggling to bring fruition out of it. This severely impeded on the rest of my project.

Most of the geometry is a flat surface where a normal map was used to produce the design.

      Now with that over, I’ll talk about my final model. I've always liked dragons and recently I've grown fond of deers. Believe me this is going somewhere. So originally I wanted to base my sentry turret off a Japanese dragon, and during research I came across a Qilin.

So Qilin’s are basically a mythical hooved chimera, which is considered the eastern equivalent of a unicorn… even though it has two horns. The animals I see in the design are a deer and a dragon. The other thing I took notice of with the Qilin is that it’s believed to be the strongest creature in mythology, beating out the Phoenix, then the dragon. Also in my research I came across Japanese samurais, who would wear creative demonic masks to scare their opponents. So basing the turret off this war philosophy and using the Qilin as a base, I've tried to create a turret which captures Japanese war culture.

The modelling stage of it was fairly easy. Lots of flat surfaces with texture detailing, meaning I could significantly reduce the tri limit down and not affect the silhouette or UVs. The only difficult bit was producing low poly antlers which because they curved heavily, was quite difficult to accomplish as well as time consuming.

     Over all, I’m really not happy with the turret’s texture and I aim to improve on this area of the asset production. Ways of doing this involves me looking into other PBR maps created by the game design community as well as looking at the materials that I’m supposed to be texturing. Elements to look at would include the amount of light reflected or absorbed by the material.