Week 5: First Solo 2nd Year Project

This week we started our third project of the year, it is the first solo project of the year and is the first design focused one too. We were tasked with designing a sentry gun and placing it in to an Unreal Engine blueprint. I feel a little unsure about this project at the moment, its been a while since I've had to design something like this. We only really did a handful of design projects last year and the work i did over the summer didn't really include much design work, i did a few design pieces but i never really took it to 3D, never mind to engine. So to start with i did a little research in to generating ideas, i decided to create a bashkit using images from a moodboard i put together. I put the moodboard together using pinterest taking influence from a variety of shapes and images.

To create the bashkit, i took parts of my moodboard and also looked for extra parts on pinterest just to mix it up a little. I started by painting over the images, i found this to be a very dull lengthy process that didn't give great results. I then tried putting a threshold layer over the image making it just black and white, the result was a little grainy  but i quite like the detail it captured from the image; with a little tinkering i could make it work. I started to throw some stuff together from a large sheet of different parts, i tried to make each bash as varied as possible but i struggled a little with this. I think towards the start of the next week i will try and add some parts to the kit in the hope to create more variation.

So for next week i will continue to play around with the bash kit and then probably take a few of the best ones and experiment with a few different parts and variations etc. I really want to start modelling early next week too, so i will probably create a whitebox from the final bash idea once its chosen. I will then paint over this white-box with any details to help finalize my design.

I feel this week hasn't quite gone to plan, I spent a large portion of the week figuring out how to tackle this project. I struggled quite a bit with this project and i feel i could of done a lot more in terms of planning and gathering inspiration. There were too many ways to go with this and i should of specified where i was going with the project a lot earlier on in the process. Next time we do a project with a similar nature i will really try and work on this.