Week 7: Sentry Gun Part I

Sentry gun. Sentry Gun. SENTRY GUN.

It has begun. It’s finally happened.

So as the constant iteration of “sentry gun” suggests, this week we are off to start on the sentry gun project meaning as formal functions on the course go, this week was very relaxed. In game production we received the brief to the project which to my surprises there are a few constraints to how we may approach our design.

Admittedly I’ve been so excited by this brief that my understanding of these constraints are somewhat unclear. I’ve just been having fun concepting in both 2D and 3D, but not to worry our tutor has mentioned that next week he will be reviewing our concepts, hopefully mine will be approved, if not however I’d be quite happy going back to the drawing board. I learn a lot from it (and just quite frankly I don’t want to ever leave it.)

Speaking of concepts since I have been thinking about this project during the film room, this week I feel like I have jumped into the deep end with my chosen theme for my Sentry Gun working on a range of silhouettes developed via free hand, photobashes and now 3d paintovers. Looking back I’ve been happy with my work rate as I feel like I have been very productive this week however I do worry about whether I am jumping too soon into my chosen theme. But this simple doubt and so far through my iterations I am very happy with my theme and designs and it seems that my tutors are as well from the feedback I received from my review during visual studies.

The Sentry gun – Hell on earth, 50’s Las Vegas

For this project I’ve chosen the theme of a demonic sentry gun with a Las Vegas aesthetic. It’s a mouthful to explain let alone type. But the idea stems from two ideas which was firstly in every post-apocalyptic text we rarely get an interpretation of the Christian concept of the apocalypse with the whole rapture and those left behind etc. Moreover thinking about this idea, and the idea of hell on earth I started to think if hell was to ever open on earth where would be the so called capital. Well Vegas of course, it’s called sin city for a reason right?

Sentry Gun Moodboard_Annotated

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The Slideshow above, illustrates my own personal progression this week. Balancing two contrasting idea's and visual styles of the saturated vegas with the dark and grimness of surreal satanic art with 50's shape language has been a slight struggle. I forgot to mention I decieded to restrict my design to a certain period in this case the 50's in terms of form language to give myself what I feel would be a coherient style guide to work with and to make sure I don't go too out there with my ideas. Anyway to develop my Silhoueettes I developed a Bashkit of vegas signs and 50's household products and form lanaguage to study from and piece together turrents. In fact some of my iterations are parts of signs which I have editted via photoshop and colour overlay to see if I could develop a strong iteration and also study 50's design. From My constant iterations I started to notice two key points of this era of design which sharp angular forms contrasted against smooth round forms and chunky porturding shapes in the case of Las vegas signage. In terms of other stylised 50's objects at first glance they seem to features a pastel coloured pallette however I have not develed into colour palletes as of yet and if the 50's is my decade of choice in terms of design I will need to further develop more boards on more actual 50's products not products stylised to connote the 50's.

As ideation continued I experimented early on with combining organic tentacle like forms with more manmade structures to convey this twisted demonic look however as I continued I stared to see it would be better off suggesting the occult’ness theme of the sentry gun in its textures and signage rather than the overall form itself, leaving me to focus more on capturing a strong “in your face” silhouette.

From sketches to value development and iteration by Wednesday I developed my white box prototype of my Turret which is by no mean the final iteration. Funnily enough when importing my chosen reference to max I noticed as a result of max distorting the texture If I compact my chosen silhouette, My turret features in my opinion a stronger silhouette as well as deals with one of my earlier problems which was my design feeling as if it were to fall down due to its small base. (I don’t know why but I naturally attract to top heavy designs).

I am now in the process of iterating on my whitebox in Photoshop via silhouetting as I had found that the front view of my turret seems quite dull. Through iterating, I actually managed to come across the idea of shaping aspects of the front views silhouette to resemble the pentagram which would further convey the occult theme of my Turret. The goal now is to think about what features/additions could possibly encompass this silhouetted shape.

During the design process I made a quick sketch of my turret which I at the time I had envisioned as the latest iteration I was happy with to continue towards 3d. This was prior to the digital sketches and just after my silhouette iteration so I had developed an idea by this point. However my tutor and several other students mentioned that the design was too noisy in detail. This idea of balancing detail informed my digital sketches experimenting with which form should encompass the most amount of detail. This idea I plan to inform future decisions of the design of this asset i.e. thinking about focal points as well as future projects to come.

Quick sketch of the details of my turret in my notebook. Note since my theme is the occult of so called satanism, I attempted to experiement with making the barrel slighly phallic to convey this distorted twisted look of the turrent and play with the idea of debauchery that comes with having hell itself in a place like Las Vegas. - The things around it are just silly doodles......

As an action plan for the next week I feel like I really need to develop more research on things such as 50’s products and colour palettes, more references of real life weaponry to inform my decisions on areas and details of my guns silhouette that I’m unclear about and also to further study real life cannons to enable me to start to think of this design as a functional product which it will be in engine when the modelling and engine stage come.