Week 7 - Defensive Designing

So begins the Sentry Gun Project, truth be told I couldnt wait for this project, but now that I've begun, something feels off. Cant quite place my finger on it though, at the begining of this week I felt pretty damn enthusiastic and now I just feel drained and exhausted 24/7. Personal issues aside I'm getting my worked done, just need to keep hitting the grain.

My initial ideas came from this design of mine above, which is basically a drone based off a hybrid mixture of the Mars Curiosity rover and Sputnik. I always imagined the drone looking kinda cute with a massive death ray shooting from the central eye, so how to make this into a turret?

I buzzed around with a few ideas of putting it on a base, mixing things from other parts of the US and Russian space programs, namely sputnik and the apollo rockets with a few sattellite pieces here and there. I kinda took on what I imagine an engineer would be thinking about when designing a thing like this; What is it powered by? how would it be set up? does it need coolant or regular maintenance? Eventually I made the decision to design it around something that would shoot lasers, be powered by some kind of exotic matter and be some kind of permanent installation.

It wasnt the only idea I had, I also had an idea for some kind of machine gun deployable backpack but I felt I wanted to go in another direction so.

I knew right from the get go that I wanted to link my sentry gun project to the character project which comes next, this is in the hopes of telling a mini story with my portfolio, since I feel like thats the brand I'm trying to get across (That I like to tell stories). I know more or less what lines I'm going across for my character project; Something Sci-Fi from a personal project I'm working on. I played around with some other silhouettes just to say how far I could push my design and still achieve the look I wanted, the look being something elegant and strong, but not aggressive. I ended up going with my first silhouette becuase I felt the best about it, I really wanted to see how I could make it work as a model, despite my peers advice to go for the bottom two rows. I agreed that they had strong silhouettes, but I just didnt feel as good about potentially modelling them as I did the first row, admittedly I loved the second row as well and time willing might make a few high poly models and render them in Zbrush for some portfolio paintings. Regardless I achieve exactly the look I want with the first silhouette with the smooth and sleek shape of the head and barrel and the strong grounding presence of the base. The others, although interesting couldnt give me what I wanted, I did think long and hard about it though, particularly the second row which I based off a microscope, sattellite dishes and one of the moon landers.

I imagined each gun in the second row firing some kind of sonic wave or something, with a loud bassy noise to follow suit.

I had to confirm my desire to model the first silhouette with some more detailed, "fun" drawings in photoshop, to see how a more planned out and accurate drawing

I affectionately called the turret EMHIL, the military loves to name things, plus it adds some flair peeks some interest. Now, lets see how modelling the EMHIL turret goes...