Initial rough sketches.
Second round of rough sketches.
Third round of rough sketches.
Mana Vault hipoly sculpt. After a few rounds of rough sketches, I decided to finalize the design in 3d to more quickly and accurately iterate on the mechanics of how the panels interlock and open.
Mana Vault in-game model.
This is a concept for the appearance of an available Mana Vault. The goal was to make them very visible to attract players from as far away as possible.
Here's a video of the opening animation. I created the simple rig and animation of the vault re-forming and opening. The VFX were created by our talented VFX artists.
The original narrative prompt for the Mana Vault was a shattered vault or treasure container that was frozen in a state that was basically mid-magical-explosion. Thinking through not just how to convey the initial frozen explosive state, but also to reverse engineer that state into the fully-formed container which would then open was a new type of challenge. To animate the reformation of the vault, I keyframed the formed version of the vault at about the time that we wanted the reformation animation to last (roughly 20 seconds), and then went back to the first frame and semi-arbitrarily moved and rotated the pieces to follow the surface of a hemisphere. The initial jitter of the vault pieces while frozen mid-air is done in the shader.
Art direction by Damon Iannuzzelli.
