Sentry Gun Submission

Name: Katie Byrne

P Number: P1413266x

Email: p1413266x@myemail.dmu.acuk

Project (The brief you are writing for):

Sentry Gun

Summary (Brief Summary of processes involved in Concepting/Modelling/Unwrapping/Texturing/Engine):

Concept, model and texture a Sentry Gun which can pivot up and down and rotate. The finished model must be imported into Engine and be animated and functional using provided blueprints. We were to make our own firing projectile models and particle effects to go along with this. A stretch goal was to create a plinth/stand for the Gun to be placed on to show more of it's story.

Visual Studies:

Beginning the project I knew that I wanted to do something slightly different to a traditional gun, and inspired by games such as World of Warcraft, decided that I would make a diguised turret that appeared to be a statue. I looked into different types of statues but came to the conclusion I liked the idea of lion statues, and began to look into the traditional types of Lions and also Chinese Lions named "Komainu".

I made a second moodboard for inspiration for what kind of scenery I would like my Sentry Gun to appear in, I also went on to use this moodboard when creating my stretch goal plinth further on in the project. This provided a lot of colour ideas and made me consider the materials my statue gun might use.

As my silohuettes would all be quite similar, I decided to add a little bit more detailing to mine as I found this was more helpful for brainstorming rather than solid silohuettes. I did many designs for both the traditional lion and the Komainu, but these are a few examples selected for handing in.

I decided that I preferred the more traditional Lion statues, as it gave me an opportunity to create the Lion quite realistically which I thought would be a bit of a challenge in comparison to the Komainu which is very abstract. I experimented with different tonal values and also with a gold metal statue instead of the stone one I had planned. I eventually decided that my original stone design was the best and added some moss detailing to it.

This is my final concept, it shows a small demonstration of how the model works and labels all of the parts used in the model, as this is not quite clear from the painted concept.

Using this concept, I then created some very quick orthographics to use when modelling my lion, just to ensure that it all lined up correctly and following the correct proportions.

Game Production:

These images show my final model from multiple views with also a low and high poly untextured version for comparison.

And below are my final renders in engine, of the gun placed into the scene with my stretch goal scenery added also.

Conclusion (Brief paragraph on how you think the project turned out/Self Critique/ Include 4 ways in which your work could be improved):​

The project turned out quite well, I think that my model fits the brief nicely and functions as intended, I even managed to complete some of the stretch goals given for the project.

Some areas I believe I could improve are, for example, the overall design of the model, while I feel it serves it's purpose, I think it could be exaggerated more to create a nicer more striking silohuette, as currently it is quite small, but perhaps this is quite good as it fulfills it's original goal of blending into the surrounding environment and not being obvious as a gun. I would also like to improve the particle effects which I have created, as I have no experience with this previously and they look quite rough and pixellated. I wasn't entirely happy with the stretch goal scenery which I created as it was difficult to make a building with only one texture sheet, so would consider doing this differently if given another opportunity. I would also try to use my tris more efficiently, as at the start of the project we were given 5000 tris which was later upped to 7500 and I did not further improve my model after already creating one to the original 5000 budget.

Overall, I am quite pleased with my model. Although it could always be improved, I feel as though I have learnt a great deal over the course of this project, such as teaching myself how to use ZBrush and how to correctly and efficiently bake down high to low poly models and the correct workflow for producing these.