Closed drwpow closed 6 years ago
First pass at ISS model
I can make some other options if this won't work. The green color isn't necessarily what the final will be.
I’d like to explore something that’s a little more stylized than an extruded 2D arrow. This gives a childlike feel almost like “Minecraft” or Crossy Road. I think there’s an opportunity to make it look “cooler.”
Maybe something more sci-fi or video-game inspired might be a better fit for the aesthetic. Something like Ace Combat 4’s UI. Notice how when the player locks onto a plane, there’s a flat cone that appears, that lengthens, or shortens as they move closer to the center of the screen? Maybe something like that. Granted, this video game’s UI is hyper-stylized and flat, but we could take something like this and add volume or lighting to that cone if we wanted to make a 3D UI (or just keep it flat if we wanted to).
Yeah seeing it mocked up, that arrow is also going to be pointing downward a lot, flipping over itself, and a 2D extruded arrow has a lot of “dead” angles where it’s not identifiable as an arrow. E.g., position the camera directly behind the arrow, or on either side, or in front of the arrow—it loses its definition and you can’t tell where it’s pointing. This would work if it were only rotating along 1 axis, but we’ll be rotating it on at least 2 axes. A shape that’s the same viewed from nearly any angle (cone) might work better.
I’d also like to explore fading the arrow out if the ISS is on-screen, so that way it only shows if you need to re-orient; otherwise it gets out of the way. Again, pretty much like that Ace Combat video, only without all the other on-screen clutter. What do you think?
Still playing with the materials and lighting for the alternate/obscured version but a screenshot of the daylight version is attached below and available on Codepen: https://codepen.io/ayanacampbell/pen/gXXbvz. Still need to add an envMap so that the gold panels have more of a mirror-like finish.