Week Fourteen (Sentry Gun Evaluation)

300 word evaluation of project

The sentry gun project has very much been a journey full of ups and downs. On one hand, I was looking forward to our first solo project of the year - I had all the tools I needed from the film room project to make this turret look as pretty as possible, and yet the process still ended up getting rocky in parts. The initial design process was something that I have come to enjoy, and the 3D modelling proved relatively easy also - the only thing that dragged it down for me was all the extra stuff; baking normals, high-poly models, engine work, blueprints, packing PBR channels etc. I still didn't feel at home with a lot of these processes, and carrying them out took a lot longer that it might have needed due to the fact that there was a lot of trial and error along the way.

Upon reflection, I believe that I may have been a little over-ambitious with my choice of design. Using so many rounded and curved shapes tends to make the unwarpping process a lot more time consuming, whereas if I'd opted for a more tradional and blocky machined look, this wouldn't have been the case. Using one of my less alien designs would have likely freed up more time that I could have spent on the areas of the project I was less familiar with, and though I am happy with how the Triple Dragon (formerly the Kraken) generally turned out, I would have very much liked to have some extra time for polish.

As a whole, though, I still managed to get the work done it time but I believe that this particular project had too many different stages for me to comfortably complete the workload to a satisfactory level.