Week 7, Year 2: Egg Sentry Post-Mortem.

It's been another busy week; the final week of the Sentry Gun project. I'm pretty chuffed with the end result. It detects the player when they get close, it shoots lasers from the right place and it even has a firing sound.

And most importantly, it looks pretty egg-celent.

Final Render in Unreal Engine.

As you may have seen last week, I've been modelling a physical version of my sentry egg in the evenings. Because papier-mâché, Breaking Bad and stress eating, is a nice way to wind down from a day of crying into your keyboard.

OK I'm eggs-aggerating a little, it's not so bad. 

I'm really pleased with my physical model. I'm not sure that modelling board was the best choice of material as it's quite stubborn and doesn't bend easily. I ended up using a lot of superglue but at least it's strong. And the legs even fold in!

Physical Model, made with Papier-mâché and Modelling Board.

But what about the animation? Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I could get it popping open in engine. I massively underestimated how much work is involved in animating even simple objects. 

I also didn't account for inevitable beginner mistakes and the enormously intimidating curve editor.

You might say I over egg-stended myself.

lolwut?

That said, I was determined to have something to show for my hard work. So I got it working in 3DS Max and rendered out a video, which I then turned into this GIF.

Not bad for a first crack at animation. I think it's pretty egg-citing.

I may have spent too long on this.

Even though it was a bit of a mad scramble towards the end, I'm really pleased with this project. I broke out of my comfort zone, tried something new and arrived at a solid result.

While it was egg-sausting, this project was a very valuable eggs-ercise.

Ok that's it. I'm done. I promise. But I'll never be sorry.

Week 6, Year 2: It's been a week already?

I can hardly believe a week has gone by. I'm not the only one either. Perhaps it's because the days are noticeably shorter now and we've not had any lessons this week.

So I've been hard at work on my Egg Sentry. Last week, I wrote about the design process I underwent to arrive at my final concept. This week I've taken that concept and modelled it in 3DS Max. I also did a cheeky bit of animating but more on that at a later date.

Lately I've taken to measuring my UV space efficiency at the later stages of my unwrapping workflow, as I start the packing process. This allows me to measure diminishing returns, the point where a significant increase in unwrapping time results in a negligible difference in space efficiency.

With this unwrap, I achieved 88.5% usage. This is not exceptional, but I was careful not to waste any time. Not to mention an unwrap that's mostly circles is pretty hard to squeeze on to a square texture sheet.

Egg Sentry UVW Template.

Moving briefly away from work, I completed a game! These past few weeks I've been able to carve out a few evenings to play Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.

There's even drawn evidence.

Post by Anya Jo Elvidge.

It's been ages since I've really engaged with a game but I'm really happy I made the time to play this one. It's a brilliant experience with some great characters and I found it really inspiring!

The Tower.

My only gripe with it was the way it ended and the last couple of 'boss fights'. I never understood the universal discontent of quick time events within the gaming community. But I get it now.

Grumpy uruk. Photo mode is just the best!

Still, it's a great game and I'd recommend it to anyone. Especially if you like Lord of the Rings. And who doesn't?

Another evening project has been modelling my sentry egg in the real world. I opted for papier mache which is a good bit of messy fun. I'm intending on doing the final layer with white tissue paper, before cutting it up to make the legs and gun slot. Hopefully I'll have put down enough layers for it to retain its shape.

The gun and other metallic inner sections will most likely be made from grey card. It'd be nice to have the legs hinge open, but that might be a bit ambitious as we only have a week left on this.

One last thing — some of you may have eggs-pected more puns at this point but I'm sitting on them until this project is over. I'm still not sorry.

Week 5, Year 2: Sentry Gun Look Development.

Last week, we were set a new project. Over the course of 3 weeks, we are to concept, model and texture a sentry gun. We will then take it into Unreal Engine and set it up to work as an interactive game asset.

Excited to get cracking, I was immediately overwhelmed by too many ideas. Towering 'War of the Worlds' style tripods and scuttling crawler turrets. With Pixar lamps, aw yeah!...No. 

A completely restriction free and directionless design brief can be dangerous.

So I took a step back and worked on something else for a while. Then, while on a late evening train, I started thinking about how an egg sentry would work. So I broke out a sketchbook.

When I next sat down at the computer, I created a bash kit out of some silhouettes from my initial mood board, with the intention of visualizing some alternative ideas.

But the egg idea stuck. This project seems to be more of an engine exercise than anything else and I want to use this as an opportunity to try new things. Animating the egg to 'spring open' on proximity is an exciting stretch goal and will allow for more in depth experimentation with Unreal Engine's new blueprint system.

While developing this idea, I also wanted to try and move away from my design comfort zone. Recently we have been lectured on the importance of designing for an audience outside of your demographic and I'm eager to put this into practice.

With this in mind, I decided to pursue an 'Angry Birds' style aesthetic, targeted towards children. I chose this because it came with a lot of extra design considerations such as practicality for reproduction as a toy, child safety, and readability on a small screen.

My final design decisions were very much influenced by these considerations. These added constraints were very useful as I was finding it difficult to make objective design choices without a clear goal in mind. 

I also approached several of my peers for feedback towards the finalization of my design. This proved to be very valuable, not so much in terms of picking a favourite, but in discovering what it was in particular about each design that people found appealing.

After narrowing it down as far as possible in the silhouette stages, I created some models in 3DS Max to sketch over.

My final concept is the result of many iterations and repeated simplification. My goal was to design a sentry egg that appealed to children and would be suitable for use in a game such as Angry Birds Transformers. I feel the final design successfully meets all those criteria and I'm looking forward to continuing with this project.

It should be an egg-citing few weeks. I'm not sorry.