Summoning Crystal

numo16

Well, I decided to finally post something in this thread. Here is a prop I decided to make randomly today. Not feeling finished with it yet, want to work some more on the top section of it, mainly the parts that hold the orb. Crits and comments very welcome.

P442

i would suggest going back to the drawing board and sketching something more interesting out, cause at this point, you have little more than a tapered cylinder with a sphere on top of it. Perhaps, make the "crystal" more crystal-like, as in a gemstone instead of just a sphere. Maybe look at some jewelery to see how the gems are mounted in. Also, the scale of the texture of those bricks/blocks are way too big. It looks like the tower is like 10 feet at the most. smaller bricks would make it look a lot taller.

numo16

fair enough...it was just a quick asset I threw together really quick today.

cycloverid

Yeah.. P442 is right. Your concept is just really weak right now.

Why is the crystal perfectly round? Even if it were kept in the tidiest of wizard's chambers and was the most elegantly crafted crystal ball, you'd expect some minor defects. Better yet, what if it was a crazy, gnarley old crystal up there?

Look at the design of a chess pawn for your silhouette, since that seems to be what you want this to be.

Your poly's are really unevenly distributed. The main 'shaft' just has no curve or cracks in the brick. Feel free to add those poly details in after the texture is where you want it.

This is something that shouldn't take you more than 15-20 minutes to get to. So, if you're not there, keep at it until you get quick!

numo16

thanks for the suggestions. Definitely some things I can do with it and your suggests have given me some ideas to use.

slipsius

if u did want to keep it perfectly round, at least have it suspended in the air with some sort of cool looking arms that go around it, something to spice it up a bit. cause really, the typical "crystal ball" is usually pretty round. so it doesnt HAVE to be all jaggy or anything. but it should have a cool design for its enclosure.

as for the texturing, the ball and the stone work dont really match. stone work is more on the realistic side, while the ball seems more hand drawn and cartoony. if you want to keep the stone work, go get some pictures of lightning and play around in photoshop. see if you make it look like there is real lightning in the ball.

uneditablepoly

I agree with what others have said about your concept. I know you just threw it together for practice, now expand on it and get some more practice! I'm a fan of gnarled crystals, myself. ;D Maybe have it floating above an interesting levitation thingy-majig pr, if you don't like the whole "look at me, my crystals float" thing, make the arms more interesting and interact with it more, holding it suspended a bit. The possibilities are limitless! Maybe add some stairs or statues around the base, as well! I love fantasy assets, haha.

JohnnySix

Try and weight polygon and texture detail a little more evenly too - right now it looks like you have a large amount of UV space for the ball, yet the texture space for the walls/tower seems extremely small, and regarding the detailing, not sure how many faces are in that sphere, but unless it's rendered as sprite, it has more polys that the rest of the tower combined.

In this instance you could get away with a very much lower polygon crystal and really emphasise the shape with some nice edge highlights, as if it's a faceted gem- then you'd free up a lot more triangles to use on things like the supports etc - at the moment it looks like a simple tri and a quad .

Did you set yourself a polygon/texture budget to stick to, or an idea of what engine you want to put it into?

GugloPWN

Is this orb sopposed to be waist height or mounted on a huge tower? Personally I like spheres, if you want to keep the crystal you can make it more interesting by making it transparent with stuff inside (a scene from somewhere in the future!).

LlamaJuice

^This. Some other people are saying how it must be huge but the size of the bricks makes it look like it'd be about waist high. I'd adjust that and.... up the polycount a lot on the pillar. The top parts that cover the orb are boring to look at. I like how others suggested rings to look at for inspiration, I was going to suggest the towers in LOTR.

numo16

Initially I was thinking waist/chest high. Basically had the picture in my head of a warlock/wizard standing over it summoning his minions to do his bidding or spying on some distant enemies perhaps. The top part was definitely one of the things I was going to redo and put some more work into. I'll do some more work on this tonight and see what I can come up with.

torontoanimator

i think a double helix design would work really well for something like this. Like two intertwinedpillars meeting at the top where they hold up the crystal