[Riot Creative Contest 2017] - Ian Touma Davis
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Here are concepts for a ground up creation of "Jade Guardian Xayah's R." The color palette was influenced by Jade Guardian Renekton and Nasus while some shape language was also taken from Jade Empress Lux. Alterations for implementation are already floating through my head - Specifically for panels 2, 4 and 5, but that's the nature of something being a concept. The sphere will also not move during the effect due to the rules so please ignore that in the concept I'd created.
First panel is simply the indicator. I used a custom one, though I noticed the new valentine's Xayah skin uses the normal indicator that morphs into a custom one I kept this as is during implementation since it's the only time you see the whole indicator easily
When I was concepting I was doing a cursory glance at the effect and how it felt but for implementation I realized the 'feathers' that wrap around here are actually very rasterized images -- maybe taken from her skin's texture of her feathers from the cape. It actually has two separate spheres with different start delays, rotations and speeds although the difference is by mere frames. The actual 'tornado' of feathers was greatly cleaned up for Xayah's valentines skin and I am thinking of taking a similar approach in my own and using shape language like they did to indicate it being a 'Jade Guardian' skin. Like how the valentines skin uses heart shaped feathers for here which then become the plane that moves across from her during the ult.
Here is the simple build up of the two weapons sheen on her to give that beautiful moment of "things are gonna get real dicey boys"
I realized the shapes/feathers used in frame two will become these blue feathers shooting out above all the other effects. I wanted a bit of a sandy feel. I have later realized I'll likely clean that up since they aren't exactly SAND skins like Shurima but just colors very closely associated with that feeling. So something I'll be watching out for as I work on it.
Here we finally have the 'at rest' which is a bit of a lie as far as the actual game goes since we all know you don't want to be between Xayah and her feathers on the battlefield. I was thinking of using a 'guardian' icon. Nasus has a very obvious dog motif. Warwick actually has no animal related motif and instead uses a unique pattern as his fear activates for an impact and lux has her unique symbol from the cast vfx of her ult. All things I'm playing with in my head as I work on this the next two days.
Thank you~
Ian
First panel is simply the indicator. I used a custom one, though I noticed the new valentine's Xayah skin uses the normal indicator that morphs into a custom one I kept this as is during implementation since it's the only time you see the whole indicator easily
When I was concepting I was doing a cursory glance at the effect and how it felt but for implementation I realized the 'feathers' that wrap around here are actually very rasterized images -- maybe taken from her skin's texture of her feathers from the cape. It actually has two separate spheres with different start delays, rotations and speeds although the difference is by mere frames. The actual 'tornado' of feathers was greatly cleaned up for Xayah's valentines skin and I am thinking of taking a similar approach in my own and using shape language like they did to indicate it being a 'Jade Guardian' skin. Like how the valentines skin uses heart shaped feathers for here which then become the plane that moves across from her during the ult.
Here is the simple build up of the two weapons sheen on her to give that beautiful moment of "things are gonna get real dicey boys"
I realized the shapes/feathers used in frame two will become these blue feathers shooting out above all the other effects. I wanted a bit of a sandy feel. I have later realized I'll likely clean that up since they aren't exactly SAND skins like Shurima but just colors very closely associated with that feeling. So something I'll be watching out for as I work on it.
Here we finally have the 'at rest' which is a bit of a lie as far as the actual game goes since we all know you don't want to be between Xayah and her feathers on the battlefield. I was thinking of using a 'guardian' icon. Nasus has a very obvious dog motif. Warwick actually has no animal related motif and instead uses a unique pattern as his fear activates for an impact and lux has her unique symbol from the cast vfx of her ult. All things I'm playing with in my head as I work on this the next two days.
Thank you~
Ian
Replies
Done for today and the timing is complete with placeholder VFX. Tomorrow I will texture everything to bring the "Jade Guardian" colors and feeling together~
Ian
I wanted to customize her indicator to give it a jade guardian's feeling while not being too busy. I struggled with making it too noisy as an indicator but really loved making it.
As far as her starter feathers go. I really loved the original Xayah's feathers in the orb twirl and when she lost that for her cosmic skin I was pretty bummed. Bringing back a high contrast (both light and dark) version in her valentine's skin was super refreshing and I was also a HUGE fan of whoever made that skin since they really broke up the shape language into something much cleaner than previous skins. Something I took a bit of for my bright feathers twirling around with the big sphere feathers in the tiny tornado around her.
It was super important to me to get a clean feeling for that 'WHOOSH" Weapon sheen that occurs in that tiny delay between cast and actual feather storm impacts. That delay feels SOOOOO good when playing xayah and I wanted that to come across in my effect by having the right shapes in the weapon sheen.
Next up was her actual feather slams into the ground. Looking really really closely at it at 100 frames per second led me to believe it was a 4 frame animation since the actual shape changes as the effect goes on for 4 frames from something fuzzier to hard edged so I took a similar approach and it gave it a really 'whoosh to ZING" feeling in them especially when combined with the bright to faded color.
I made sure to use a saturated dark orangish hue effect to go along with the feathers and featherstorm impacts as a way to focus the eyes in the giant noise that is her effect. I wanted my mid transition tone/color to be the color for the shine on the bottom which I took liked the nasus icon on. I tried to get that same noise feeling in my texture/shader.
I made it look like the actual effect (after the hit vfx) disabled the enemy by binding them in place like her normal 3+ feather recall ability. I took the same approach for that status effect of a strong base circle effect around the 'enemy' orb with a miniaturized cylinder version of her feather sphere textures and bright feather storm.
Instead of a bright sheen effect (though the feathers themselves still sheen) I wanted the jade guardian line smoke homage by having little smoke puffs come out as they land.
Throughout the process Color was super important to me. I'm aware her colors could be arguably close to Hextech or the already existing cosmic and I wanted to take that challenge and own it. Hextech uses squares, diamonds and circles to define its shape language in effects while the cosmic uses a lot of hard whites and high contrast in the effect with less 'shapes.' I Really enjoyed abusing the shape language of the Jade Guardian's series and its colors. At first I wanted to do the Jade Empress colors since it has greens, I love greens and greens would separate it from the blue/gold color series. In the end having the challenge of making shapes and certain hues define my VFX as well as keeping it to the more common 'guardians' was way more fun. I can see Xayah saying "Rakan we're supposed to GUARD the empress, come back here" as Raken says "But babe, you ARE my Empress" or something haha.
Anyway here are the final video shots for anyone who is interested~