First things first, I Finally got a design that I liked! It is a fusion of my favourite parts of design 12 and 16; Mostly I just took the gun detail of 12 and merged it with the rest of 16s body (whose shape was Inspired by 1920s car designs, in particular the 1929 Bugatti coupe ) I absolutely fell in love with.
(photo from http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/g1237/classic-coupes-7-sleek-rides-of-the-1920s-and-30s/?)
just look at those curves! I wonder what makes them work so well? What was it inspired by? Car designs are amazing in the fact that they must be functional but they are also warped and abstracted to an amazing extent to give the rider a certain impression, like ferocity, simpleness or speed; such things are difficult to capture and make tangible, yet people can capture them it seems.
I then decided to a quick mock-up of my model in 3ds max. I want to make it clear that it is going to be a quick model, I won’t really pay much attention to the topology or how easy or hard it is to unwrap; all I care about is the shape, this is so I can see what the front of my model looks like and how I can edit it (as I’ve only been using silhouettes at the moment ), once done I’m thinking that I’ll just take a render of it at all angles to make the orthagraphics, then work from that as it would be far faster and I won’t have to worry about certain parts just not adding up in the orthographics.
As I did this one thing became glaringly obvious. My design was off.
It all looked good on paper, however in practice it looked far from acceptable, the neck was far too thin to support the barrel and the gun head. The base was far too small that I feared that in real life it would have toppled over in an instant.
The front view the gun looked far too uniform, it was far too straight, it needed to flare out more at the bottom; not only that but the front view looked morning in comparison to everything else, so I decided to try to add some interest to the front more. (I’m thinking adding an art deco-decorated style grill just to fit the theme in which this design was shaped by?)
The side of the model also needed work, it just looked dull and the decoration I wanted to do to the sides (the half wheels) just didn’t work; I’ll have to think of another way to decorate it.
After seeing the main problems in my design, I went back to the drawing board and made some changes. And my how it changed.
The neck has become thicker, I made the body thicker on the bottom and flared it out at the sides and I make the head of the gun smaller; all this is just so the gun wouldn’t topple over.
I also removed some parts of the gun head, (the counter balances flying off to the right) as it was getting a tad busy and detracting from the rest of the sentry.