A Brief Evaluation

The sentry gun project was definitely something I was looking forward to, though I have to admit I severely underestimated how much time it would take.

The first couple weeks into the project I was very excited, I enjoyed researching and gathering ideas that would influence my turret design, I enjoyed making my silhouettes and concepts even more. I wanted it to have two weapons, one of those weapons being a flamethrower so I designed my mood board to have several sections; flamethrower ideas, conventional weapon ideas and sci-fi weapon ideas. I tried different combinations of the three, some turret designs had sci-fi/flamethrower combinations, and others had machine gun/flamethrower combinations, having three main themes to throw around made creating good quality ideas (silhouettes) a lot easier. I produced a lot of great concepts but I was lacking a lot of colour iterations which probably could have helped me choose a better print and pattern for my sentry gun, not only that but because I didn’t make any silhouettes of the sentry gun’s front or back view my 3D designs suffered.

I really wanted to create the ‘Spitfire’ design (see silhouettes for reference) but because of my lack of experience in Zbrush I thought it was best to go with second best (‘Stalker’ design). The turret was well modelled and I did well to keep below the tri count whilst maintaining the turrets shape considering how many different objects my final designed had. I manage to use roughness, metalness, specular and emissive maps effectively, but I didn’t execute normal maps to great effect, this was mostly due to my turret design not having intricate details and grooves, this is something I need to improve