I started on the Monday, after we had gotten the brief, by collecting pictures from Pinterest and compiling mood boards. I needed a starting point of what to look for and tried to consider my own interests to begin with. I like history (even better if it's potentially dark and disturbing) and thought this may be a good place to start. I don't know why it bothered me so much, but I wanted to stray away from steam punk, because even though it is awesome, it's probably been done a lot before. After looking at existing Sentry guns for reference, I looked at Ancient Egyptian artifacts and Shipwrecks and Underwater ruins. I wasn't sure how I could make Ancient Egyptian artifacts work other than the colour scheme, which would have been fairly interesting. With the underwater ruins and shipwrecks, I was reminded a lot of the lost city of Atlantis. It was suggested that the sentry gun could shoot blasts of water, but I was unsure about this.
This was my first moodboard, with a selection of different paths to take.
I started looking at natural shapes like twisting branches and vines and came up with an idea I did actually quite like, which was to have a sentry gun made of twisted vines and gnarled tree roots, and this would shoot a sort of magic energy. My source of inspiration for this idea was from the Spriggans in Skyrim.
I chose to take the Ancient China section of my mood board further in the end though, because after I created that section I felt more excited about making a start and felt more inspired to do so. I felt like I would be less limited with ideas for this aswell.
After this, I compiled a larger moodboard of just Ancient Chinese reference, to have a good starting point to build my bash kit.
Using this bash kit I created a page of silhouettes. I found this difficult at first because I was over thinking EVERYTHING. I realised the next day that they ones I did when I wasn't paying as much attention were actually the best ones. I chose my favourites from these, then asked a few of my friends around me which ones they thought were best and that I should take further. I've taken people's votes into consideration with my own opinions and have considered critique comments and deduced my choices to these to 19, 21, 24 and 26.
I compiled the comments I'd had on these and my personal favourites were 19 and 24. I'd loved 19 from the beginning anyway, because I'd grown attached to the idea of making a kind of Dragon Sentry Cannon. Amanda gave me an awesome idea with 24 though. She was like '24 looks like a really fat cat.. hey you could look into like those Chinese Lucky cats.' Which I thought was an awesome idea. I'd been feeling down about my idea direction and this perked me right up as I started researching them. Whilst I was doing this I also started making more silhouettes, working up each of the chosen ideas and seeing where else these could take me.
Researching the Lucky Cat idea actually made me realise that it was a common misconception that they were a Chinese tradition; they are actually a Japanese tradition. I kind of loved the irony in this idea; the 'lucky' cat statue with creepy, sad, staring eyes being a hidden weapon. I love the idea of having this in a game; being in a Japanese temple or something and walking past one of these statues and hearing the cogs turn and the ceramic grind as the statue turns towards you and starts firing off rounds.
Even though I still loved 19, I was so inspired by 24 and really wanted to take it further. So I did.
I looked a little further into the different types of Maneki Neko and discovered the Daruma Maneki Neko, which is where the Cat holds a Daruma/Dharma doll. This is a traditional Japanese doll modelled after Bodhidharma, founder of the Zen sect of Buddhism. This is so perfect for the example of it if it were in any kind of temple. and just adds to the irony of it being used as a weapon... pretty un-zen. Another thing they always carry is the Koban, which is a gold coin used during the Edo period in Japan. Traditionally they're made our of carved wood, stone, porcelain or cast iron, or if you're thinking expensive, Jade or Gold, which I will consider when deciding the colours and textures.
I experimented with what the cat would be holding, what the stand would look like and where the gun would come from. I liked the idea of the cat being ideal for a disguise, and I played with the idea of the arm rotating to fire the rounds. I wasn't sure how I could make this work with the blueprints though, so I put that idea to one side, and decided it could maybe be an added feature if I reach the stage where I can start thinking about stretch goals. I tried to decide here how the pivots might work. This made me anxious, because I was worried that the idea I wanted to go with wouldn't work. I looked at the brief and example model to check where the pivots were, and checked it on mine. The base and the horizontal yaw were fine, the only bit I was worried about was the gun pitch. I tried this as a ball and socket type thing, and selected the gun pitch area in Photoshop, and changed the pivot and saw that when I rotated it, in theory it should work. I was still worried though, and decided that after I had made concept decisions about the face, I should build a test model to try out in Unreal engine.
I really really wanted to make this statue creepy, so I experimented with the face, pulling the mouth into a cartoonish grin, making freaky eyes, etc. In the end though, I decided on the original version, because I find this creepier than any of the versions that I concepted. I don't like that it looks like it's staring at you with a completely black expression. I think if I was in a room with loads of these it would make me feel pretty uneasy. However, I have this annoying thing where I am so intrigued by things that make me uneasy that I kind of love that I hate it.
After this, I did some quick colour tests and got some second opinions on which were the best to take forward into concepting. I'm still playing around with what I want the gun to look like, so this was just a test to see which colours worked best.
From here I made a quick model and put it into engine to see if the pivots would work the way I wanted them too and I was so relieved to see the cat rotate to face me, the gun pitch making it follow me up and down if I jumped into the air.
Using the same model, I used the clown rendering technique that Mike taught us last week to block out various sections ready to make paint overs to further help me decide on textures.
This is the first paintover so far. It's not finished yet and I plan to do a few more, and decide on what the gun will look like more, because at the moment I think it looks a little bit uninteresting. I think maybe it needs to be fatter, because I like the idea of it looking like a cannon, and it could have cool engravings on it. I'm looking forward to progressing with this, especially getting to the texturing stage, because I think I could make this look really good with PBR.
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