Week Seis : Worky work work

This week has been a good and productive one! After finishing off my concepting at the end of last week I had all of this week to focus on 3D modelling. Or so I thought.

It turns out I managed to get everything done far ahead of my schedule! I had put this entire week aside for 3D modelling work but I managed to finish it all by Wednesday. I'd say thats a success. I really think the whole week has just been good and productive with alot of hard graft and work. It's a good thing.

My little turret looks good and adorable in 3D, just as I had planned! There were no real issues when it came to modelling this. I was wary about making the curves and smooth parts looking right but it also wasn't really an issue. Maybe I've just started getting comfortasble at 3D modelling. Maybe that's just crazy thought.

Then I had the fun challenge of making my little turret dude work in Unreal Engine 4. Suprisingly it was quite easy. It's been set up in a way where basically as long as you follow the instructions you can simply plug parts into the right places and it all works straight away. It's really impressive how easy all of this stuff works. I think I'll spend some of next week messy around with the blueprints and coding just to see what I can get working.

Then we get to texturing. This sends me all along till today, getting this all done and working right. It always takes some tweaking to get the roughness and metalness looking right with PBR. Trying to make this look all shiny and retro-futuristic did take alot of tweaking. Adjust the brightness on this, the contrast on that.

But I'm happy with my end result here. I've got it looking shiny and smooth but theres some texture there as well when you look nice and close. I've got some emmisive glow and importantly it turns and follows and shoots me like it should!

Next on the agenda for next week is making myself a real life model. It's almost good I have a full week for this because I am particularly bad at making models. I also want to play in Unreal Engine and learn some more. I always find that playing around with programs like this can be the best way to learn. For example I want to try and mess around with particle systems. This is a laser weapon after all and trying to get a cool energy effect would really complete the gun I think. But this is all for next week. We'll see what I can manage to get done.