In terms of design, this was a very open brief. We were given 5000 tri's to do with as we pleased, the only restraints, if you could call them that, was that the turret had to have a pitch and yaw, in order to turn 360° and look up and down.
Starting out, I had no idea what I wanted to create. I began collecting a lot of images of turrets and different forms of artillery throughout various era's. I mostly enjoyed looking at the 16th and 17th century cannons and other old artillery so by the end of the moodboard I had pretty much decided that I wanted to create something along the lines of a turret for a pirate.
I created concepts by photobashing various elements of my moodboard together. Because of the nature of the design I was going for, it was hard to imagine an old 16th/17th century cannon that could reload and repeat by itself. The designs along the top looked cool but were impractical for a more realistic design that I was heading towards. I decided to go with something waist height, that could be manned and reloaded by a person/pirate. Thinking about what the cannon could be mounted on, I looked at old coat racks and camera tripods.
As much as I love painting and 2d, it was far more practical for a design like this to begin concepting in 3d as soon as possible. I created multiple iterations in Max, and narrowed down from there before reaching a final model.
Despite the fact we were given a large budget of 5000 triangles my final model landed around 2800. It felt very unnecessary to add pointless edge loops or more tri's than was needed to convey the design effectively. I decided to use as many tris as I thought reasonable.
 | |
| Final model |
I thought the platforms of the stand created a cool opportunity to add some accessories, so I modeled a linstock, some gunpowder cartridges and cannonballs.
This turret belongs on the deck of a pirate ship, and appears to be rigged together from a few other things. When thinking about textures, I imagined something that looked worn out, battered and weathered. I used the albedo and roughness maps in conjunction to create rust, and included a lot of dents and scratches on the rough/height maps. I also wanted the wood areas to appear somewhat bleached by the salty sea and sun.
This is the final model in unreal with textures applied, I was pretty happy with how it turned out and definitely got what I was looking for with most of the textures. The model also worked perfectly with the blueprint, and I had just enough time to apply some sound and particle effects too.
 |
| textures applied in UE4 |
Mid way through this project we were suddenly given the task to create a poster that would be used to advertise our turrets. This was a fun challenge, I decided to take a more comic approach-
As usual, there's certainly a few things I would like to have done differently during this project, however I will save that for my next post.
