Week 5: Sentry Gun Fun

This week I was given a new project brief. 

In 3 weeks we have to produce a working sentry gun , from concept all the way to attaching it to pre-made 'blue print' in Unreal Engine so it moves and shoots at you. The only real design constraints of the project are it has to be made of 4 parts; base, horizontal yaw, gun pitch and barrel, and it has to be 5,000 tris or less.

I had crazy ideas like an Egyptian god turret, or Roman gladiatorial combat guns etc, completely off the wall stuff...  but I found that when sitting down to begin I was at a complete loss. Too much creative input had been thrown at me with my head going 'what do I do, how do I even art anymore'.


Trying to steer myself in a sensible direction I started looking at designs of current sentry turrets and apart from finding a really cool Ghost busters turret deign, I was still hitting a wall.

How was this inspiring me? Not at all really. I talked with my tutors and we came to the conclusion that, because I wasn't interested in making standard 'normal' turret designs why the hell was I looking at them for inspiration.

Back to the crazy ideas! To help with the idea flow we were asked to bring in an objects that we could take inspiration from, so being indecisive I bought in a lantern, a carriage clock and a toy Lamborghini. I made mood boards:

I decided to throw in a few buildings to get some crisp and clean interesting silhouettes along with the Lamborghini lights and sharp edges.

With the lantern and clock mood board I went for more crazy silhouettes and styles to give me some really whacky ideas.

I still felt like there wasn't enough inspiration in front of me so I wrote down a load of things I liked on several bits of paper, and picked 3 at random. I got crabs, crystals, and Norse mythology. Well this should be interesting.

With the Norse mythology mood board I focused mainly on symbolism and the Norse pattern for ideas on how to decorate my turret.

Crabs board, has lots of cute crabs I could turn into a theme for my turret.

This is my favourite mood board, I really want to use this for the material of my turret, and the colour scheme.

After making all my mood boards I decided to throw them all together and create a bash kit, so I could build all of the really cool crab-crystal-lantern-clock-car whatever they are turrets.

And these are my first iterations with the bash kit I created. My tiny crab minions!

I think that these are looking pretty cool and I'm already getting ideas of how to mash them up further. Stay tuned for next week, where the crabs get crazier and more awesome (I hope!)