Sentry Gun project

Hello! This week is reading week (no lessons) which means that I get to sleep for a little bit longer every day. The only inconvenience is that there's barely any contact with our teachers and I have a few questions about this new project...

We were asked to design, model a sentry gun. It could be anything we wanted, from schi-fi nuclear shooting gun to a snow ball cannon. I was incredibly happy to hear about this project because so far we barely used our creativity for our second year projects.

We were given a presentation on how to go through the design process so that we would end up with an awesome gun.

First step was to create mood boards so I searched the internet and that's what I initially came up with:

My initial idea was to create a futuristic turret that would fire electric bursts and I spent about two days working on that.

I created a bash kit by stealing shapes from my mood boards and then I put shapes together to create cool silhouettes.  When I was half way through the process one of our tutors advised me on not taking big shapes from other peoples work because it will end up looking like theirs.  

At this point I looked at my progress and I just didn't like it anymore. I was doing it without any motivation and I decided that I had to start this project all over again.

I chose to randomise the theme for my turret because I had too many ideas in my mind and in the end, fairy was the winner.

At this point I didn't have a clue on how my gun was going to look like but at least I was doing something that excited me. 

I started by looking at tree roots, flowers, butterflies and nature in general and slowly I incorporated more fantasy elements, like glowing mushrooms and crystals.

Then I stole some shadows from my mood boards and created a bash kit.

I shared my turret silhouettes with my friends to find out which ones were the most popular and I was surprised to see that some people picked my least favourite shadows, I suppose they weren't that bad after all.

I picked the most popular choices plus my personal favourite and refined them. Then I looked at functionality and only number 4 (from left to right) worked. It also became my favourite so I was happy with my choice. Looking back I think number 1 looks quite nice, it reminds me of a carnivorous plant. 

Next post I´ll be talking about color picking and my 3D model!

See you soon, 

Carla.