Sentry Turret Project I - Arrrggghhhhhhhhh the colours!!!

New project time! This will be our first solo project of the year and the brief is to design and model a sentry turret that can be used in a Unreal 4 blueprint system which is set up to turn to follow the player, tilt and fire projectiles.

First I created a Pinterest board gathering a load of cool random things which could work on a sentry gun, starting off with basic mechanical bits and bobs and then going onto some cool sci fi weapons and a load of retro goodies from Dark Roasted Blend. I then created an initial moodboard of all the images I gathered then did a bit of brainstorming by the side:

First ideaboard plus some notes

I had a couple of ideas floating around before and during this ideaboard: one idea was to have some sort of briefcase that folds open into a sentry turret, I also had another after collecting the images of having some sort of projector or camera that has been adapted into a disintegrator ray but I still wasn't committed to the idea.

I played around with one of Mike Kelly's techniques about randomization which helps which direction to go in, I had a couple of ideas in mind and randomization just helps move things forward by picking one randomly and going for it. After doing this I ended up with going with an 80s theme (It also helped that I came across some really great images that persuaded me to do the theme)

I started to find a load of really colourful 80s imagery and it brought me to my next idea which involved one of my favourite things: Lavalamps. I was thinking it would be cool to have some kind of turret that could shoot out exploding lavalamps or massive lava blobs of death which would really give me the opportunity to play around with colour and the particle engine in UE4.

So yeh colour, lots of it:

*I will not be held responsible for 80s-induced seizures*

This second moodboard is grouped (loosely) into colour reference, retro computers, weaponry and other random 80s bits. From this I began to develop a bash kit from the silohuettes for some simple thumbnail creation.

basic bashkit for thumbnails

Then I used the bash kit and photoshop lasso tools to create a load of thumbnails for the sentry turret, I coloured the lit bits separately so they are distinguished from the rest of the thumbnail and makes it easier to read.

Lava lamp death machine

Stay tuned for the next part of the concepting where I will do some basic blockmeshing and some refined thumbnails. (and maybe a bit of intense colour dropping)


Bye bye.