Week 6- When in Doubt Sketch it Out.

So this week was a fairly hectic one for my sentry turret project despite not having any official lessons. Throughout this week my turret  has gone through so many iterations it's not even funny, in fact it was downright frustrating, I just could not find a design that worked.  I tried to speed up the process a bit by bringing some contenders into 3DS max, and I found that it was possible to make all of them without much difficulty, so that didn't really help in narrowing things down. So I just went screw it and skipped a couple of my steps and brought colour into my iterations, and that made a tonne of difference. From that I had more of a solid idea to work on I also tried to incorporate some features of Tesla coils into my final design thinking back to one of my 3 main ideas I had during the beginning of this project.

For there I started thinking of how this turret would work on a mechanical level, mainly focusing on the pivots as they're the things that did not make sense to me. As my turret sits on a rock I would need something that would bite or latch onto the surface easily, so I though a drill would be the best thing to start with. I remembered doing woodwork years ago at school and not being aloud to use regular power drills, instead we had these old hand powered drills, a quick search for these, lead to me finding the right shape for the pivots and stand of my turret. from there I tried to move into getting a solid line work of my turret, but I really could find something that worked. My previous iterations lacked something to me and I just could not get that nagging feeling that this turret was not the right idea to go with. A this point I have no enthusiasm about my ideas because none of them were that strong to me. So in the end I scraped my turret and started again.

So I spent an afternoon just with my mood board in front of me sketching out whatever I could, which actually really helped things. I think I do work best when I just sit down and sketch, though kit bashing thumbnail images produced a lot of iterations for me I think I detached a little from my work because of it. It was a good way to work, but I guess I'll need to tweak it a little. After sketching I found some things that I could work with and refine. So in 2 days found my new turret design that I took forward into 3D.

I choose idea 1 as a basis for my turret.

My current 3D model

With a quick test in engine I find that my model works and I am back on track with this project. Right now I have started some paintovers to figure out my textures for this sentry turret and everything's going well (knock on wood). So this is where I'm at, I'm going to continue with my paintovers, pick a design, then make any changes to my model. From there I can hopefully speed through the unwrap and texturing stages of this and get everything out on time!

Work in progress