Following on from last weeks post, from there I went on to texturing, which with PBR is nothing but an absolute joy. Metalness and roughness maps are beautiful things that really make the texture. When it came to texturing I tested it straight in engine, so I would straight away be able to see what the final results would be, instead of putting it into Marmoset and having to edit it again later. The textures on the Daruma doll came out really well, so I feel like it's such a shame that you only see it for about a quarter of a second as it flashes past you.
Below is the main Sentry with just an albedo texture applied to it. The only difficulty I had with this really was with the face makeup, because the seams run up the side of the face.
As you can see below, once I added the metalness, roughness and normal maps it really brought the model to life. I feel like the cat really looks like shiny porcelain. As well as testing the textures, I made sure that the pivots on the main body of the gun worked the way that they should. I had already been checking it as I went along and noticed as I worked on it that the projectiles weren't firing once I had replaced the example with my own mesh. This was easily solved by placing the socket at the end of the gun barrel and removing the collision mesh.
By this time it was reaching the last few days of the project. I had made it my stretch goal to get the arm rotating independently, so it could look like it was reloading. I don't think I realised that this would actually be quite difficult, especially as I don't really know anything about blueprints. I received a lot of help from Hazrat to attempt this, and even though we didn't manage to get it working, we sort of got halfway there and I feel like I did learn from it. I say that, but as soon as I try again I will still probably be baffled. *Sigh* It's a learning curve I guess, I'll carry on trying.
Anyway, I built the arm separately to be able to do this and it took a lot of editing of the pivots in 3DS Max to get it dead on, because when we tried to get it rotate with the model at certain points it would sort of break away from the body. That works now though, so I'm glad that's one aspect sorted. When we tried to get the arm to rotate back and forth however, it whirled around and disappeared right through the body, turning my Sentry gun into something wildly sassy. I'm going to hand it in without the dramatic arm gestures though, and continue working on it to try and get it working.
These are my final renders of my 'Maneki Neko' Sentry gun. Like I said, I'm disappointed about the arm rotations and really wish I had pushed it further. Having said that though, I'm pleased with the aesthetics of the final result and am most proud of the overall design process that I went through. It was at this point that I was most inspired and I am so excited to begin concepting for the next project.
We were also given the task of creating a poster to show off our design. I thought this was interesting as it's not something we normally do. It was pretty cool to do something different, though I have to say I think I could have come up with something a lot better. I'm going to have to work on my poster design skills too by the looks of things! I do like that this poster is a tad ambiguous. Its message is a bit sinister and I like that, because it was my intent for the sentry gun to be a bit creepy and this adds to that where creepiness is maybe replaced by cuteness.
Our next project is the 'Dichotomy Character' project, where we have to design a pair of characters that belong to the same universe, but in appearance and personality are completely different. The brilliant thing about this project is that we can adapt whatever style we like. I don't feel like we've really had this opportunity much before, so the prospect of having free reign over the design of our characters feels so exciting!
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