2d Lesson 14 - Cannon Paintover Brief

This week we were giiven a brief to design and create a turret, that we could then take into photoshop and paint over as a high quality render.

'PlanetSide 2 - Time Lapse Weapon' Notes:

Maya:

• Starts simple polys and extrudes them up.
• Turret is mostly composed of resized rectangle meshes.
• Edits the vertices to round off sharper edges.
• Mostly duplicates previous shapes and places them elsewhere.
• Adds several metallic material to different parts of the model to break up it's geometry.
• Renders with mental ray with a daylight light source.

Photoshop:

• Uses lasso tool to isolate areas to paint.
• Uses clone tool to fix geometry.
• Uses warp and skew tool to overlay textures to wrap around the model.
• Paints additional details directly on.
• Dodge tool is used to add highlights.

Concept:

To begin with I started off with some rough sketches and ideas, I was mainly focusing on tryign to capture the silhouette and shape of various turret designs.

I settled on a combination of 2, 3 and 4.

I started off making the core as a sphere, and the barrel as a cylinder, I then extruded the barrel out to form a base.

I seperated the barrel using the extrude tool to add more detail to it, then I made a cylinder at the base, before extruding it up and extruding out legs from the center to stand it up.

I extruded the wires by making a curved line, then using extrude to pull it out along the model, I then started tweaking the polygons and adding last minute details. Finally I added texture to the gun in order to break it up and lay out the colours, before rendering.

I rendered using mentalray and a daylight source, before taking the image into photoshop.

I started off by painting and smoothing out the geometry on the canon to make sure any hard normals aren't glaring through. I then started painting in the areas I wanted to glow, before adding a glow layer filter to them to give a soft blurred light source.

I used the warp tool to overlay a texture over the canon so that it curves and matches the model, I also added painted details in a similar fashion.

 

I painted in some final touches, and started adding highlights using the dodge tool and darkening the shadows with a multiply layer. I added a background, and rendered a shadow (had trouble with maya so it came out as a reflection :( ), before adding a final overlay to bring out the colour.

 

I enjoyed the project as a whole, and I chose to use Maya in order to better myself at it, I'm fairly pleased with how the paint over came out, the idea wasn't my initial one - but I'm still pleased with how it looks overall.