Week 7- Sentry Gun Project.

This week we began the sentry gun project. The brief stated we where to make a sentry gun that fits a unreal blueprint which can track the player. The brief also stated that the sentry gun should have various visual design methods used to get the final design.

I began by creating a mood board full of various sentry guns, actual guns and various other designs to aid me with my design, at this point I had no idea which direction my sentry gun would take.

Whilst analyzing the mood board a lot of the weapons following the sci-fi genre caught my eye. Not only where the designs eye pleasing but the use of two simple things allowed the guns to have a dynamic depth and give it an illusion of realism. the weapons used simple. well placed lights dotted around the design to give it an atmospherical feel, they also used various flat simple planes to cover intercut elements of the gun for example gun (circled in green) has flat planes covering very well thought engine below. I really liked the mixture of lights and well placed flat planes as the gun looks realistic and an element that could exist in the real world. With the decision to stick to sci-fi i created a second mood board only for the sci-fi genre.

The second mood board included various sci-fi designs sectioned of to three categories. The first category [Yellow] was a section I filled with already designed sentry guns to give me overall inspiration of the shape and feel of the gun, I specifically analyzed with the idea of a dual wield sentry gun and a single barrel sentry guns to see how each different one captures its overall feel. The single barrel sentry guns had a very sci-fi sofisitcated feel to it but on the other had adding a another barrel on both sides made the gun feel more intimidating. The second category was a section for already designed sci-fi weapons, this was to simple giving me reference for the various geometry of sci-fi guns. The third category was a section for tripods and various methods to mount my gun, this category was also went in adjacent with the first category. After analyzing the full mood board I went back onto one of my old sci-fi character design as I felt i captured the feel of simple planes mixed with intricate designs under the planes.

With the second mood board created i was able to begin my silhouettes, As I already knew what kind of feel and genre of design I was going to do. I narrowed my silhouettes down to only six as with the lower numbers I was able to concentrate more on each design and the way the gun works (working gun components stated on mood board above).

With the silhouettes done I was then able to take the three strongest designs (2, 5 & 6) and develop them further but only concentrating on the geometry of each part of the gun and the overall feel of the gun. With these designs I was also to work further on the mechanics of the gun adding pivot points and what axis the should rotate on. I also added notes on the animation of different parts of the gun. these designs can also be used for commercial u