Sentry guns

Evening all. Last week we were tasked with concepting and modelling a sentry gun which will be placed into UE4 to do cool sentry gun activities such as shooting and hanging out at the mall. We've got three weeks on it with a 5000 tri budget, so it's pretty lenient, also considering you can make any kind of sentry gun you want. It can shoot orange flavoured mars bars if you wanted it to. You probably wouldn't though cause that's wrong. But it definitely has to shoot something because it has to replace existing models that we've been provided with. These existing models already have a blueprint hooked up to them so we don't have to worry about the technical aspect of getting these things to fire. Although it does mean we are slightly limited to certain aspects of our sentry guns. It's never going to work any different from the example gun we were given unless you want to do a lot more work, which makes no sense to do. So last week I went full man mode on silhouettes. Silhouettes being one of the most important things when you're designing something, like proportion to life drawing or perspective to drawing landscapes. It's what will hold it together regardless of the pretty colours.

Like I said before, we're kind of limited by what it can do. It needs to have a base, a body, a barrel like a normal turret or sentry does. You can't over complicate it cause it just won't work in engine. So all of these silhouettes follow the same structure. They're just made up of literally anything that looked remotely interesting. Obvious things like engines, car parts. Number 25 was based off of a jumping cat for instance and 16 inspired by a deep sea squid. Deep sea squid are so creepy, I'll just leave a link here. The stuff of nightmares. Looking at these silhouettes there's nothing glaringly obvious that ties them all together which is good because that means I hadn't iterated anything yet. It was just the raw ideas at the time which is a better starting point that saying, this is exactly what I want my gun to do. From there I chose eight of my favourite and spliced them with each other to get more interesting shapes.

I dwindled the options down from around sixty to four then slapped on a few values just to see what they'd look like. I still had no idea which one I wanted to make so I took the values further.

Number three just clicked for me so I rolled with it.

I also came up with what it should actually shoot because that's a fairly important thing for a gun. I've pretty much based it entirely off a skill from League of legends where a character shoots a beam of energy across the map. I'm going to have to send you to some dodgy montage now but you'll get the point in thirty seconds. I'm not entirely sure how that's going to work in engine as of yet, but I'm sure I can do something that at least looks similar. Right now it's all about the modelling which I've nearly done. Then onto unwrapping and engine work. And as usual, here's a few thirty minute paintings. Cheers.