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.

Week Seven: Texturing Hell

     Continuing immediately from last’s week blog post, over the weekend I modelled the final turret model. I used the previous model as a foundation, to cut down the amount of time I’d spend on modelling as I left too little time for texturing. I’ve mentioned a couple of time before on this blog, that I feel that I’m awful at texturing, and so I need to make sure I spend enough time on this section. I'm also in the camp that texturing is incredibly important for an asset, more so than modelling. Voxel games and pixel games have shown me how important it truly is.

Minecraft is probably the most well-known voxel game.

If I made all the blocks colourless, it’ll be incredibly difficult to make out the forms of the objects. This is probably the most extreme example I can think off to explain my thought process.

The modelling part of the asset production is something I feel quite confident in, especially low poly modelling. With a model cap of 5000 tris to make the turret, I could use the tris to smooth out any cylinders or rounded edges as well as producing elaborate antlers which feature heavily in the design.  

Modelling the basic form of the turret was done quite quickly, with the only significate amount of time spent on modelling the antlers, which also turned out to be the most time consuming section of the unwrap as well. The unwrapping was quite tricky for this model, as there was some geometry which was awkwardly placed inside the main cannon. Other than that, it was quickly done.

But now we get to the bane of asset production for me. Texturing. I started off adding the basic colours to create the albedo layer, each colour having its own layer. This makes the work flow easy for me, as well as none destructive via the usage of clipping layers and masks.

              My finished roughness, normal and albedo. Looking at back at these maps, I can see some of the crucial mistakes I have made on these maps. The Albedo map isn't too bad but looks odd with the paintly texture and the photobashing of the rust onto the cannon. The roughness map is all just block colours and instead it needs to be broken up, such as adding more values to the block colours. The normal map has sharpness to it, which creates a sharp transition from the flatness to the indent which for some parts, does not work. 

Week Six: TOO MUCH SILHOUETTLING

    I made much more progression this week compared to the previous, I managed to push the sihouttes to make much more interesting designs. Bases had more weight added to them to give the illusion it can hold the gun up.

       I ended up producing 30 base designs and chose my favourite 14 from these to play around with.

      When producing the silhouettes I was thinking about the mechanic within the gun, where they would be placed in the body and how it would react together while the gun would move to follow the player.

     So from the 70 silhouettes above, I cut down even more, choosing the strongest designs from the bunch. 

       My final 14 sihoulettes from the 70 above. Most of the forms, are taken from japanese mythical beasts, such as the Qilin and Dragons. Although, I significatly cut down the designs, there is still a lot of designs above, so another round of removing designs is in order.

         I dropped from 14 to 8, and then from 8 to 4. The four I chose to move forward with (black), were what I felt to be, the strongest designs. I quickly sepreated the elements of the guns to give myself a better idea of the sections of the gun.

 By this point I was sick of designs and needed a break away from it. I decided to produce 3D models of these four to help me visual the way the turret will look in different views and if anything looked odd. This would involve the base not being wide enough to support the gun. I also felt that seeing a model in 3D would allow me to see how strong the design would be from different views.

        Out of these models, I went with the second one down, coloured in lilac. I felt the base could support the weight of the cannon, much like the first one. The bottom two didn't look like they could support the weight of the gun, nor could I think of a way to make them look like they could. 
        With this week over and now a solid design to build upon I can get on the way with creating a final model.