Turret Project part 2: finishing up design and orthos

This week was employable week for the uni... this had little impact on me whatsoever because my course is hardcore and keep working through it. I have still been crunching on with the sentry project and this week was spent finalizing my orthographics and modelling. This week I also got a special life drawing session when the Leicester Media School opened, but more about that later (im going to keep this post about the turret).

The sentry project has so far been successful and i'm happy with my design and angle on the project with knights (even though I have decided now that someone else may be doing a knight theme after going back to the drawing board). I have now finished my model after many, many problems with both making the initial models and later on with the high poly model and the baking process, which I have never done before.

After finalizing the orthos I was ready to go onto the modeling stage which was lots of fun. even though at first I found it hard to know where to start once the ball was rolling the model was shaping up nicely. Where I did have some troubles were with my orthographic images wouldn't fully translate into 3D, I realized that I would have to change the shoulder sections as that were too small and didn't look right not covering the "shoulder" section of the body. I also widened the body because even though from the side there was a dynamic silhouette, which conveyed the power and strength of a charging knight, the front was a little skinny and didn't show any strength. I solved both my problems with the FFD modifier in Max which allowed me to make the sweeping changes to the geometry needed without having to redo all my work.

Once I started getting the model into its shape and I had most of the basic blocks down I decided to put it into Unreal so I could make sure that my turret would work with the blueprints before I got too far ahead. This was mostly a success and once I figured out how the components section worked and had my exports in the right positions with the correct pivot points I was able to have the turret tracking me in engine. I also had an experiment with the socket system so the gun actually shot out from the barrel and the muzzle flash would spawn.

Once I knew that my turret would work in the engine i finished up the model and began to make a high poly model as well. I had some problems due to my lack of experience with the turbosmooth modifier and how to get the desired results. Never the less I continued forward and managed to get the look I wanted and slowly went through the long process of baking the normals. This has brought us up to the present where I'm still trying to figure out why the ambient occlusion isnt baking properly. I will now use the rest of my weekend to start the albedo, roughness and metalness maps and catch up on how I have fallen behind on the project. I was supposed to be finished with texturing by the end of Friday which is not the case but because I have one week to go and have already tested with engine I think I may be able to finish the turret by Wednesday with time to adjust anything a chase any loose ends in my project.