Asset: Ayleid Furniture

Model, texture and sound development of P:C
User avatar
R-Zero
PT Modder
Posts: 331
Joined: Fri Sep 25, 2015 8:50 pm

Post by R-Zero »

roerich wrote:I don't care much for the idea of single legged tall furniture pieces. Just having four or three legs is fine by me, I don't think there's any other elegant solutions. The design of the legs can be weirded up, bird legs, curious shapes, whatever.
It also won't work perfectly with the very squarish, symmetrical layout of the Ayleid ruin set in general. If we were to have these vertical, weird, suspended furniture rooms everywhere, the ruins should have been much more organic, circular and irregular in shape.
As I see it, a singular tall leg is the best way to create furniture that is both elegant enough to pertain to a sofisticated elven race and also incorporates the octagonal design Ayleids are known to be obsessed with. I also don't get how these would conflict with Ayleid ruin set, as both would be completely geometric, not organic, with mostly straight lines and very simple curves.
In general I think having the suspended furniture as an asset to use in some rooms is fine, but it's also very limiting for interior modders.
Like infragris put it, it would end up looking a bit silly in well cluttered rooms.
Can you elaborate on these two points? I'm not sure I understand how exactly are these limiting and/or silly-looking in large numbers.
Another could be a nest-like 'bowl chair' for lounging and meditation.
Great idea! Perhaps just as cage-beds would be later mistaken for torture appliances, whese would be thought of as some type of brazier :D

User avatar
roerich
Cruel Warlord
Posts: 2166
Joined: Sat Jan 03, 2015 3:10 pm
Location: Denmark

Post by roerich »

I just think a chair on a giant tall leg would look wrong, kinda funny and completely impractical. How does the thing not fall down all the time? Is it bolted to the floor, and then what if you want to move it? I don't think the obssession-with-the-number-eight needs to be played out everywhere, and not the avian theme either. I think four legs could look just as elegant and Elven and all, hell you could even give the chairs eight legs. And I'd also like to stress that some points of Ayleid culture should be recognizable, in order for the weirder parts to stand out. "Alien in excess becomes mundane" etc.

I think having a room with a lot of chains hanging down with large numbers of suspended furniture, benches, tables and chairs in different levels has the potential to look really silly, don't know how to put it or argue why. Might just be a personal preference, but I can't see it work as the general way their furniture functions. The occasional hanging chair, hanging tables and especially cage-beds has the potential to be incredibly rad and awesome, but I think they'd look way cooler if it wasn't overused.

As for the interior modding limitations, that's just personal experience. Assets that can only be used in a very limited way, (i.e. that it requires a ceiling, and a ceiling in an appropriate height, and makes limitations for how you can present the room) can become really hard to work with. Don't know how to put it other than it can become limiting.
"I don't know if you are kidding but I 100% support a Big Mouth Billy Bass in PC"
- Taniquetil

User avatar
Infragris
Project Administrator
Posts: 1396
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2015 7:51 pm

Post by Infragris »

I think the single leg idea can work as long as the tables and chairs have enough support on the floor, like in the pic below: mount them on an eight-pointed cross the size of the table, and they should be stable enough. As a general rule, you should be able to put a reliquary box on one side of the table without it looking like it should topple over.

One thing I would change is the furniture's height as depicted in the drawing: the Ayleid were about the same size as altmer, so there is no logical reason why their tables and chairs should be so high. It would also be unpractical for the player if they have to hop or levitate to see what's on top of a table, same problem as before. In fact, playing on the social system of the Ayleid, I would like to revive one of the original proposals to make the tables excessively low, almost knee-heigth, like japanese furniture: instead of tables, you could have footstools you have to kneel on. This sort of furniture would be meant for the common folk and servants, while the Ayleid master and his retinue hobnob it from atop their floating chairs, never touching the ground. Remember that not everybody in the Ayleid society was a wizard, they had plenty of common folk: only the nobility and the warriors who inspired the battlemage maxims had access to true magic.

I do have to agree with roerich: the strangeness of the Ayleid should not be exemplified in their furniture. The Ayleid, for all their weird ideas, were still humanoid and would need furniture suited to humanoid needs. Only a handful of the true sorceror-kings were really inhuman in shape and nature, and even they were not born so. Nor would people be constantly levitating: even the telvanni don't do that, and they are as much (if not more) magically attuned than the ayleid. I also agree that a place where everything is suspended from the ceiling by chains would look silly: it would raise too many immersion-breaking questions (why go through all this trouble? What if they wanted to redecorate? What if you're short a chair at the table?) and the basic interior set is clearly not made with this kind of stuff in mind: if you wanted to portray a society where all furniture is bolted to the ceiling, you would have a completely different tileset on your hands. Also, it should be noted that suspending everything from the ceiling is not actually a thing birds are known to do.
Attachments
ayleid furns.jpg

User avatar
R-Zero
PT Modder
Posts: 331
Joined: Fri Sep 25, 2015 8:50 pm

Post by R-Zero »

roerich wrote:I just think a chair on a giant tall leg would look wrong, kinda funny and completely impractical. How does the thing not fall down all the time? Is it bolted to the floor, and then what if you want to move it?
Well, there are a number of chair (and not only) designs IRL that have a single leg and are perfectly stable and movable:
Spoiler
Image
Image
Image
Imagine these, but with longer leg.
This "leg" can even actually be 8 legs coming together to form a "stem" and then spreading back:
Image

Maybe we could mke these not as tall as in my picture in the preivous post, but still considerably taller than conventional furniture, just low enough for Player to be able to access the clutter atop without levitation (maybe with a small jump at best :D )
I don't think the obssession-with-the-number-eight needs to be played out everywhere, and not the avian theme either. I think four legs could look just as elegant and Elven and all, hell you could even give the chairs eight legs. And I'd also like to stress that some points of Ayleid culture should be recognizable, in order for the weirder parts to stand out. "Alien in excess becomes mundane" etc.
I think the very word "obsession" implies that this design is found very often. It doesn't even need to be that overt: the suspended chair I made forms a vaguely octagonal shape when viewed from the top.
Plus we have a lot of octagons in chandeliers and containers.
I think having a room with a lot of chains hanging down with large numbers of suspended furniture, benches, tables and chairs in different levels has the potential to look really silly, don't know how to put it or argue why. Might just be a personal preference, but I can't see it work as the general way their furniture functions. The occasional hanging chair, hanging tables and especially cage-beds has the potential to be incredibly rad and awesome, but I think they'd look way cooler if it wasn't overused.
Actually, when brainstorming the suspended furniture set, one of the thing I imagined was exactly this kind of room, with a lot of furniture suspended above the ground layer and especially around the walls, creating a sort of backdrop. Maybe somewhat like Stella's Room from FFIX, for a lack of a better example:
Image
With the suspended furniture being an see-through openwork, this would create an interesting picture with a kind of parallax effect (I'm not sure I'm using this word right though :D )
As for the interior modding limitations, that's just personal experience. Assets that can only be used in a very limited way, (i.e. that it requires a ceiling, and a ceiling in an appropriate height, and makes limitations for how you can present the room) can become really hard to work with. Don't know how to put it other than it can become limiting.
"it requires a ceiling" - well, Ayeid dungeons have the ceiling everywhere just by the virtue of being dungeons, right? Or are you concerned about using these in exterior cells?
By "ceiling in an appropriate height" you mean "minimal height", right? I can see how suspended furniture could have trouble fitting in low ceiling coridors, but thankfully the majority of the rooms themselves have a lot of vertical space.
I get that you can't do some things with suspended furniture, like putting them on the side or even upside down, but on the other hand it gives you an almost complete control on the z coordinate instead - somrthing you can't do with the conventional furniture. Some of these problems couls be alleviated by introducing fallen down versions of these, which could also help to create a feeling of abandonment and desolation.

User avatar
roerich
Cruel Warlord
Posts: 2166
Joined: Sat Jan 03, 2015 3:10 pm
Location: Denmark

Post by roerich »

Can we agree on the following:

1. A set of low furniture like the style Infragris described. Kneeling pads, benches, tables, scrollcases and the like.
2. A number of suspended high end furniture as well as floor versions of these.
3. Clutter! Knives, spoons, chopsticks, glasses, vases, plates, bowls, singing bowls, welkynd fashioning jewelry equipment, torture tools etc etc etc
"I don't know if you are kidding but I 100% support a Big Mouth Billy Bass in PC"
- Taniquetil

Post Reply

Return to “P:C Asset Development”