wingdings

Hello!  We've made some great headway on the tutorial and are working on concepts for the environment to model.  Today I am going to highlight two props I've been working on, the Wind Pedestal, and Water Pedestal.

These two pedestals are objects that the player needs to interact with in order to advance in the game.  As their names suggest, the Wind Pedestal is interactable with the wind ability, and the water ability is used on the Water Pedestal.  It's therefore important to make sure that these objects correspond to the ability that needs to be used on them.  In addition, I also needed to think about affordance, and how the player would know that they are affecting these objects.  The first thing I did was come up with a couple concepts for each object.

I wanted to make sure I explored a variety of options to compare to one another to see which ones worked, and which ones didn't (bad ideas included).  For the base of the Water Pedestal (top row), I wanted to try to emulate the shape of a chalice, which has a round form.  I primarily wanted curves to be the distinguishing factor between the Water Pedestal from the Wind Pedestal, so the Wind Pedestal has a more square frame.  While it was easy to come up with ideas for the Water Pedestal, it was more challenging to do so for the Wind Pedestal.

I kept asking myself (and google), "what is the universal symbol for wind?" My first thought was that cloud face blowing out a gust of wind.  Hardly appropriate material for an inanimate object.  There are also windmills.  And clouds.  What else?  For some reason or another, I decided to explore a feather/wing motif.  Not directly related to wind, but you see them blowing around in cutscenes a lot.  Another reason I gravitated toward wings is so that when the player uses wind on them, they would spin or move around in some way.  After exploring a few wing types, I tried to go the cloud route, with little success.

Next, I showed some of my teammates for feedback.  Below are the results.

There were two main questions I had for them:  

1)Which of these reads the best as a Wind/Water Pedestal?

2) Does the chosen design meet desired functionality requirements?

The circled items are the concepts people gravitated toward, and the X'd items are ones that do not work at all.  For example, The last 3 Water Pedestals in the top row read more as Wind Pedestals, and were thus tossed.  The Wind Pedestal in the last row looks like a shining sun.  The X'd Wind Pedestal in the 3rd row looks like it is covered in vines.  

There was only 1 Water Pedestal that they seemed to like, and that was the second one, though it did have some problems.  There was concern that the dripping water coming out of the chalice seemed a little too directional, and might cause the player to interact with it in unintended ways.  As for the Wind Pedestal, the first design was favorable, as were two of the more cloud-like concepts.  The problem with the ones with clouds in them is that they would be difficult for the player to tell if they are doing anything with them.  

With that in mind,  I decided to do a couple more concepts based on the circled items.

  

I tried a couple different things with the water droplet motif, most of which didn't seem to be working.  The Water Pedestal ended up staying pretty close to how it was previously designed.  In a way, the Wind Pedestal also ended up staying close to how it was previously designed; the focus here was trying to make its base a little more interesting.  I think I was also getting tired at this stage and ready to move on with my life.

The circled items are what I had to work with when going into the modeling stage.  Here are the models are they currently are (plus another one of our assets).

When translated, the Water Pedestal didn't end up working at all, especially with the angle of our in-game camera.  Here, it is much simpler and needs some refinement, especially compared to the Wind Pedestal.  We will be testing with this model regardless.  As for the Wind Pedestal, it was originally going to have some clouds at the base that didn't seem necessary once its other parts were modeled.  As a note, the asset to the far left is also an object that is interactable with the wind ability, and thus has a similar wing motif to the pedestal.  

   

Here is an approximate shot of what these assets will look like in-game.  Their silhouettes read pretty well, the Water Pedestal just needs to be pushed up to the same level as the other objects.  Perhaps I can show that off next time...until then, let's hope Atlanta doesn't get shut down for another week from weird weather.