Week 7 - Sentry part 3

   The majority of this weeks been working late on the sentry project, fixing last minute stuff. But on Thursday we got another major project, the word swamped comes to mind, in fact I'm yet to start the new project. so basically its been all sentry with a tiny bit of life drawing thrown in to mix it up a little. Don't get me wrong the sentry project has been awesome, well, for the most part. A few minor problems and a few days of, what the fuck have I done. But I got there.

   So, life drawing. Faces, facey, facey faces....Hmmmm...yeah well this weeks been...all...about faces. As you probably could have guessed. A subject I'm usually not to fond of, or should I say good at. I'm willing to learn but every time I try I end up with a pile of crap pretty much. I have made quite a bit of progress since starting the course, but I'm a long way off what I would call good. I like it when we have a bit more of a relaxed life drawing, like this week. We were all cramped in like animals but it wasn't too bad. We started off with he usual warm ups and then negative space, and finished with a long final pose.

Some warm up's, and a study of the face.

   Now on to the good stuff, the sentry. Its the last week on the project and its been mainly texturing and engine stuff. But before I get onto that, I realized that I didn't show my model to you guys last week. So here it is.

Wireframe view of my sentry gun model.

   After finishing modeling, or what I thought at the time was finished. I imported it into Unreal Engine 4.5 to test everything was working. Nothing went wrong like I expected it too, so I  had a bit of fun with it. After importing the meshes for the projectile and shell, I also imported a mesh I had previously made for a bin and a gladiator. Altered the bounciness of the shell (Gladiator) and rate of fire or each. Here's the result.

   Before I started texturing I needed to figure out what colour I wanted my sentry to look. As its based on the Black and Decker brand, it preferably needed to be either the colour they use, or a colour one of the other well known power tool brands uses. This left me with companies like Stanley and Bosch. I gathered a few picture of tools for these companies and colour picked them to give me this pallet range.

   Doing this wasn't enough for me to see what each of these colours looked like on my gun. So I took the silhouette I made for me to model off, and applied each colour too it. I used each of the colours twice so I didn't just dismiss a colour because it didn't look right in that one variation. Ideally I should have done this more than twice to give me a better idea as to what looked good, but I didn't.

   Personally I liked the bottom blue one, but when I applied it to my model I didn't, so I swapped it out for a few of the other designs and eventually came to the conclusion to stick to the Black and Decker colour scheme, with a mix of the two colour variations I made.

   Texturing turned out well but all the way through I had my doubts. The albedo looked to bland. This was because the majority of my texture sheet consisted of the side of the gun. All of which is made of plastic. As you probably know plastic isn't really an interesting texture. Its flat, not very rough and its also not very shiny. Leaving most of my texture sheet plain. But I guess its not how your texture sheet looks it's about the final product. Now that on the other hand looked pretty good, if I do say so myself. Even better when the normal, roughness and metalness maps were applied.

   When I had imported all my textures and meshes into UE4 I started playing about with the settings of the blueprint a little more. Changing the rate of fire for each of the projectiles and shell, and making minor adjustments to other things like gravity and bounciness to make t seem more plausible. A section of my texture sheet consisted of a touch screen panel with buttons for the settings and such, a section I found out I could illuminate and make glow. So that's what I did.

How to make something glow in UE4.

   This isn't the exact section of my blueprint I made glow, but it is the same method. This is from the projectile which I wanted to glow as well, like a tracer round. I got it to glow but it didn't leave a tail behind it, and looked more like a projectile from a star wars gun, so I took it out. The section I did make glow glowed blue and is in the final renders below. you don't get the full effect as in the scene its light, but I should glow like the pink/red above. 

Final design in UE4.