Turret Design WIP for Eden Star

Hey,
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.

After a the last few refinements had been done I knew how the head of the turret was to look so I got on blitzing that out.

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.