Week 7: The Wild Flower Sentry Turret- Post Mortem

So as the week ends so does the sentry turret project, and I'm very happy with the results. The week started out with me finishing the paint overs of my turret (in which I picked the first one to model) and from there I could fall into the familiar process of modelling, unwrapping and texturing.

Being able to move onto the texture side of my turret pretty much relax me as it's one of my favourite parts of creating assets, and gave me the opportunity to just sit and paint for the day, something I haven't really been able to do since I came back to university. It was nice to have a good finished painting, even if it is just parts of a texture.

From there it was a lot of tweaking in UE4 to get my turret to work the way that I wanted. I was also taught how to use emissive maps, which added a cool glow to my model and really helped to bring it together. Unfortunately the glow doesn't show in actual game-play (however it does show in simulation) so that's an issue to be addressed.

As an extra part of the project we were asked to make a little promotional poster for our turrets, Since my turret concept is kind of out there I found this really difficult. How cold I put a glowing blue plant with a creature inside of it in a real world setting? I first thought of doing a little shop of horrors type movie poster to showcase my turret, then a bio hazard waning sign. But then I thought it would be a good idea to segment my turret into a more day to day setting, so I settled on the idea of portraying it as a regular garden seed packet.

Overall my turret turned out well. There was a lot of frustration and issues in the concepting stage of this project and having to start again half way through the project obviously isn't ideal. I ended up with a turret I really like, but I can also see ways in which I can bring it up a level when we come back to it. I feel like my concept needs further developing at this moment as my turret sits in pretty much a vacuum in ue4, when I go back to the turret I'd like to make a simple environment to house it, so the concept does not seem so out of place. At the beginning of this project I was also trying a new process of working when it came to finding silhouettes and thumbnailing. Though I produced interesting results I detached quite a bit from my ideas and in the end could not bring them back to a concept that I liked, so I started again. Obviously the solution to that isn't to stop trying new ways of working so there's not much I can do to fix that issue within my project. When we come back to this project I'd like to mess around more in ue4 since I want to include sounds in my model, and improve the particle effects I currently have. I also did not get round to putting in an animated texture for the eyes on my turret, so I could get them to blink, another goal for next time.  As much as I love how my texture turned out  I think I would add a bit more colour variation to it so it isn't all just blue. Maybe add some reds or pinks into it.

So that's the Sentry turret project, though there were a lot of mess ups during the beginning of this project, which slashed my development time in half, it doesn't really bother me that much, I made decisions, and after a couple of days found out that they were the wrongs ones, can't be helped, live and learn.