I realise its been a while since I have last posted so I thought I would get on with some of the things I have been doing with Flix.I have been working on a turret design for a little while that I am going to write a bit about. I started pretty much the way I always do by gathering references to aid in my designing process.
This gives me a good study of how other designs have formed a strong silhouette and also how they have been designed functionally. I sat down and did a few small drawings to study how the functionality and look of my turret was going to feel in game.
I sat down and in few hours blocked out a a first initial design to present it to my team for feed back on how they though it looked and what they would change to develop it further. I aided this with a small animation of how it would spawn and move to give the animators help them see how it could move and aid them in suggesting changes in functionality.
After getting a massive load of feed back from the first block out I got a better idea of how as a collective we wanted to push this design so I did a few alterations and got some more feedback from my peers. With this 2nd pass block out I altered a few of the shapes to try and bolster the strength of the design. the design was starting to take shape but I still felt that my design was lacking in places. I turned to our trusty concept artist to help me develop it further at this point, Gavin Li. (http://kydaconcepts.blogspot.co.uk/ here is his Blogger address =). )
Gavin has a great eye for bringing out the best of a design and he came back with some mind blowing changes that we all agreed would look awesome. Here is what he produced. Designs, as I have learnt in games, can change at any point as a part of the development process.
Through the development of this design with Gavin and the rest of my team I had already started to put together some of the high poly in 3Dsmax whilst waiting on the final refinements to our concept.
To make it easy for myself when blocked out the head of the turret I set up a plane with the concept image on it. on the plane I used the cut tool to flesh out the main shape segments and used the shell modifier to give the plane segments I was cutting out substance. It looks ugly at first but its the easiest way I found to quickly make a difficult concept out initially before putting in extra geometry to refine the front silhouette.
With the High poly coming together I only had a few extra bits to add before its ready to be baked to a low poly.
