Air Inferiority

So overall I like my turret, I feel I attempted a difficult but unique concept and achieved all of the learning goals I set out to achieve in this project. But there's always things to improve on, and now that I've finished, here are some of the points I don't think I've mentioned in previous posts.

Okay, my main grip was my texturing, I feel my maps were strong and the roughness metal map worked super well with each other to make scratches, paint and rust, some of the materials don't read great. I think it' s because I wasn't sure what exact material I was going to use, even while I was making it. All I knew was it was some kind of plastic fairing material. I'm referring specifically to the white armored bits around the turret, I feel as though if I knew what exact material I wanted, I could have nailed it, but I was really just guessing. It could have done with being higher contrast with the metal for sure. Again this dates all the way back to my concepting phase where I should have done more in depth value studies and that itself might be the route of the problem.

Also seams, there were some... rough seams on that model if you knew where to look, I should have spent more time smoothing over them definitely. Also there were some areas of texture that in general weren't up to standard, but in fairness, those are areas the player wouldn't get to see, like top of the wings and bottom of the gun, but regardless it would be in good practice to bring those up to the same standard as the rest of the gun.

Another little misadventure I had was with Zbrush, which on reflection really just wasn't necessary. But at the time I just wanted to try it, so, that was that. But anyway the problem I had with Zbrush was because my model wasn't perfectly symmetrical before importing, I couldn't use the symmetry tools to get nice equal details on both sides. Weirdly enough though, after I went back into max and redid the symmetry line, Zbrush still didn't like it so I ended up just painting once side then copy and pasting it on the normal map.

Here's one I know I mentioned back on my concepting post, but it's still really prevalent. I think the weakest part of my model was the texture design itself, even if I did salvage it slightly by stylizing it half way though the texturing process. I would like to avoid this in the future and should give it far more attention in the early stages. what I needed was a good single value painting, so I could do a bunch more good looking designs faster, I could also have experimented with some higher colour contrast designs.


Going to reiterate again though, that I do like my turret. I think it's a pretty cool design and will definitely be using a similar silhouette/bash kit based work flow again in the future.