Adorable cats and guns

So last week I showed you some thumbnails and my moodboard on the turret project; I'm a hell of a lot closer to making the Catling Gun a reality! Right, after I did my thumbnails I got feedback and chose 6 of the most popular ones to refine further; this is what I came up with:

I got a lot of good feedback on these designs, people liked the ones that were more compact and incorporated cat features. I decided to go with 2E and use some of the elements from 2C aswell; this then gave me my final design (as shown below).

After deciding on a final design I painted over it and came up with 4 value studies; I eventually went with 2 because It wasn't as contrasting but it looks visually appealing, I feel that the others have too much contrast to work with my overall design. I then went on to doing colour variations; using the colour schemes I put in my moodboard.

Once again I got feedback on these and the brighter more powerful colours were chosen. I then went onto do another colour pass, in which I analysed the colour separation and values more thoroughly so that it worked better as a whole; I also played around with some decals and decoration on the turret.

After all of this I decided to go with 3A as my final colour scheme as it stands out and is so sickly with pastel colours that it hurts your eyes; from this I then moved onto designing my projectile. I didn't go into as much depth with this mainly due to time but I feel like my first cat design fitted the stylised theme perfectly, therefore I went straight onto colour.

I got a lot of feedback on my cats (mainly saying that they are all adorable and to do all of them because people could not choose) but I decided to go with 3C because it fits my gun in terms of colours and values; if I was to use a darker cat and helmet such as 2B it wouldn't look like the turret and the projectiles were cohesive. After the hard choice of choosing a cat to shoot out a gun I went onto compile a quick final design image to see how it all looked together. Here's what it looks like:

Its not perfect but its just a rough design until I do my paint-over. Overall I feel that the way I changed my guns values work extremely well due to it now looking absolutely nuts which is what I was aiming for. The gun is meant to be the essence of me so of course it has to be a ice cream coloured turret powered by a wind up toy key that shoots adorable cats with helmets on,whilst playing music through a gramophone; if that doesn't scream Amber I really don't know what does. But just to prove that even though all of the colours are light and saturated the values still break up the model into easy readable chunks I have converted it into black and white; as shown below:

As you can see the values are still there even if they are subtle it still breaks the object up so  it can be read as a turret from faraway.

So after I had a rough concept to work from I hopped straight into 3DS Max and started to model my cat projectile to see how low poly I could make it so I could see how many triangles I had left for the gun itself. Here is the completed cat model coming it at just under 500 tris which is what my original estimate was.

I have also started on my turret model; here is a work in progress shot of it:

I have still got a lot to do on it but i have already learnt something whilst modeling; I learnt how to use booleans which enable you to cut and add shapes on other geometry, I used this when creating my main tube in which the cats are contained.

Overall I am really happy with how this project is turning out I am really proud of it and I am having a blast making my turret (excuse the pun). I feel like its one of the first things I will be happy to put in my portfolio; lets hope that me taking a few days off due to illness won't compromise any of the work from now on. Can't wait till its in engine and shoot cats! IT'S GOING TO BE ADORABLE!

References:
Family Guy cat .gif: http://collectionofawesome.com/2012/12/27/family-guy-cat-launcher-gif/