Sentry Turret II - Final Concepting and Modelling

Hi again! Continuing my concepting work from last week I created some more refined designs and made some value buildups based from them. I then used these to create some basic blockmeshing.

Refined Thumbnails with multiple iterations

Value buildups, here the turret is beginning to take more shape

For the blockmesh I imported the value buildups onto a plane in 3dsmax and created some simple geometry and then kitbashed some different ideas again from the bottom row, the iteration is strong in this one. :D

I got some opinions from other students on which design  looked better, I found that the bottom right corner design kitbashed with the second along from the bottom left looked best and I taken this to colour.

Colour Comps

The colour stage was an important one on this project as I wanted to have that awesome, 'space age' 80s plastic toy feel, plus it was a personal goal of mine to make something super colourful for once so I drawn from from a tonne of colour palettes to get something cool. 

You better like colour comps because here is the motherload... 

Colour Comps I - First draft of colour schemes, at this point just trying different things out to see what would work and what I liked.

Page 2, just variations on the previous page - messed around with inverting the colour placement and using Adobe Kuler to correct the palettes.

More of the same, some of the colour schemes here reminded me of the kind of colours that retro video games consoles used to be (especially the top left and bottom left)

After these I created on more page where I gathered together the different variations I liked and compare them to the idea I was going for, I was originally going to go with glow-in-the-dark plating but then decided the light on the lava might be enough as a highlight, also I wanted to give my sentry turret a retro Nerf gun kinda feel with the decals and colouring so this allowed me to focus my colour design down.

Final Colour Comps - Here the colours are more narrowed and I picked my final palette for moving forward, I got a piece of advice from my teacher about not going to saturated with all the colours to it doesn't overpower the palette, this is done by staying within an imaginary circle within the colour picker so the saturation isn't too high on all the other colours.

Next I created some Decal comps on the colour scheme I chosen, I referred back to my moodboard for this stage to create some designs that scream '80s toy' and tried to replicate some of the iconography on 80s posters and toy boxes.

Paintover

Next I used the blockmesh in 3ds max to create a multitude of render passes for the concept paintover: this included the creation of a 'clown render' which is just flat colours applied to the object which could be used to mask out different materials when painting over in photoshop. I rendered out this plus a lighting pass, a flat value pass, a mask and a ZDepth pass which I can use as a mask to control fog effects or DOF in photoshop.

Here is my final paintover, plus a little embellishment text. :)

Final Paintover concept.

Modelling

Next stage was creating the model. A stretch goal I had for this project was to create a high poly bake using turbosmooth in 3ds max so I can add on really nice smoothing to the plastic and nice surface details like bolts, cables and vents. Most of the work was already done on the model from where I did the blockmesh so all I had to do was cleanup the mesh and add details from the paintover. 

Then I used the low poly as I base for the high poly... which was extremely hard, so far on this project the high poly has been the  most difficult and time consuming thing. I just hate how turbosmooth affects topology so much, though on the flipside it does help me learn what good topology is meant to be like. :D

Texturing

Texturing was also easier as I could just colour drop from my concept and copy my decals straight over, the later thumbnails were based from the blockmesh which made transferring the decals super easy. Most of the effort was taken to creating the emissives and to the roughness maps, to which I added a darker value towards the edges of the metal areas for a more worn effect.

Wireframe model with texture applied. 

At this point my turret is ready to move into engine, apart from some some work on the texture and the high poly. Now time for the UE4 cool stuff where I can facemelt things with lava...

Next issue! Engine time...