Week 5: New Beginnings

The Sentry Gun Project: Silhouettes

Last week I had already teased the start of our new project, but this week I will go into further detail. It is a solo project and we have to design and create a sentry gun. We are given a lot of freedom with this and will only work on the artistic part; the blueprints in unreal engine 4 have been created for us already.

After I had received the brief on Monday I didn't straight away start on the project, as I was still quite tired and exhausted from the previous project. I didn't manage to get a lot of rest on the weekend either, so instead I decided to wait until Tuesday before I start working. So the next day I created a moodboard to gather some ideas. It took me quite a long time to come up with an original idea and one after the other I saw people sharing silhouettes for their own sentry gun so I knew I had to catch up and I spent pretty much all night working on getting my moodboard finished and creating some silhouettes.

To create my silhouettes I used a bash kit that I created by taking silhouettes of objects from my moodboard, which was a very effective way of getting different interesting shapes together in a fairly quick time. Here is the bash kit that I used and my first set of silhouettes:

Bash Kit

First Set of Silhouettes

As you can see, for my bash kit I used a variety of different tripods for the leg part of my sentry gun. I then used household objects, such as a hand mixer and coffee machine for the body. I also used a few objects which you would usually find in hospitals, as my original plan for my overall sentry gun was to give it a medical theme.

Feedback!

After that I posted up my silhouettes onto Facebook to get some opinions of fellow students and the silhouettes that stood out the most were 7,11,12 and 20. From there on I created a second set of silhouettes and tried to incorporate more different objects into the body and also modify them slightly. I once again repeated the process of posting it on Facebook to get feedback.

Second Set of Silhouettes

Part of the feedback I received included that people liked the legs from the 4 series, but would've suggested them to be a bit bulkier to support the guns on top better. 1D, 3A and 3D were also very popular. I took forward from that and created a further 6 silhouettes and also included a bit more detail this time.

Third Set of Silhouettes

I once again posted my work to Facebook and got suggested something that I had spotted myself as I was creating these silhouettes: The gun design from 1 looked very nice, but also the legs from 4. So I went and took that bit of feedback to try and combine both. I mainly decided to stay with silhouette 4, but I changed the details on the gun part to resemble silhouette 1.

Final Set of Silhouettes

My first change was okay, but I found it a bit confusing myself and I also felt like changing the legs a bit, so I did another one. I was a lot happier with that and finally decided to take it as my final silhouette.

Final Silhouette

I am quite happy with the design and I am now going to create a basic block out of the silhouette in 3DS Max, which I will then use as a base to paint on my final piece of artwork and orthographics. Hopefully by the end of next week I will have finished this and maybe already have my final 3D model finished, so that I can use the third and last week of this project to focus on getting my sentry gun textured and into unreal. See you next week~