Thought it would be interesting to keep you guys posted on what sort of development goes on.
Glowing Eyes
I have wanted to make the totem's eyes glow for a while now. Thought now would be a good time to tackle it. The colour of the glow will indicate to the player what sort of power they have active in the 'eye' slot and the intensity will show when they can use it.
Now to make the eyes glow they have to be a separate object to the rest of the model. The reason for this is that they need to have a separate material that 'glows'.
Quick implementaton - place spheres on the eyes and place our glowing material on those spheres.
Okay, spheres sticking out of the eyes do not look that great. The spheres do not properly match the shape of the eyes, and hence, do not match the rest of the model.
I tried making the spheres transparent, emit light, still didn't look good.
Then I had an idea.
Incoming - Contact Lenses for Totems
Lets do this properly. People in real-life change their eye colour by putting on contact lenses, so why can't we do the same thing here?
Now to make these contact lenses fit properly, we need to have the right shape. To do this we need to go into the model and cut out the eyes to get the shape we need.
Placing these new lenses on the eyes with our glowing material:
A lot better. The effect also allows us to show how much energy for the ability is left. With each use of the power it discharges, and then slowly fills up again.
Final result:
We can make this look even better with some dramatic particle effects, but we'll leave that for another day.