Work on Tu’lia’s Staff, a hero narrative asset for Planet Postmoderna: The Advent, has reached the bottom of the staff.

With the crossed leather wrap on the grip finished and locked, the next section was the lower crystal setting beneath it. That setting holds four turquoise gems, decorative side pieces, and the long, spear-like purple crystal at the base of the staff.

A setting built from established materials

A lot of this section reuses material language the staff already has. The housing of the setting has a warm reddish-brown base with restrained tonal variation, so it sits naturally below the leather.

The four turquoise gems reuse the turquoise treatment first developed for the feather-shaped ornaments on the headpiece. On the feathers, a crystalline surface layer was added over the turquoise to give the stone depth. For these smaller gems the base treatment was enough, so that extra layer was left out on purpose.

The decorative side pieces were finished in the same aged brass that runs through the rest of the staff. Brass was chosen over reproducing every color from the concept literally. This keeps the lower setting tied to the brass fittings, bands, and linework above it, so the staff reads as one crafted object and not a collection of separately decorated parts.

Painting a crystal by hand

The purple crystal needed a different approach.

It starts with a deep violet base, then gains a brighter violet inner variation that includes a hand-painted fracture treatment. The next step was surface highlights to suggest faceting and crystalline structure. Tools that generate highlights automatically along edges didn’t give useful results, because the crystal is smoothly shaded and has no meaningful hard edges for them to follow.

So the highlights were painted by hand. That gave more artistic control and let the material suggest facets and internal structure without changing the geometry.

Two decisions shaped how those painted marks read. First, they were set slightly below the surface, so they look like recessed fractures and not raised painted lines. Second, parts of the long strokes were erased and broken up, so the fractures move in and out of the surface instead of forming continuous seams.

Transparency was considered and set aside for now. The layered violet color, the fractures, the surface highlights, and the recessed depth already give the crystal a convincing sense of depth without extra shader complexity.

Seeing it as part of the whole staff

A final review of the full staff confirmed that the purple crystal works as a secondary focal point. It stays visually balanced with the skull, the turquoise ornaments, the brass, the carved materials, and the leather above it. That matches the staff’s intended visual hierarchy, where the headpiece stays dominant and the rest of the staff supports it.

What’s next

The crystal setting, the four turquoise gems, the brass setting details, and the purple crystal are complete and locked. One planned addition remains before export: a restrained emissive treatment for the purple crystal. After that come a final material review, texture export, and the start of Unity HDRP hero-asset validation. A HA-001 one-sheet highlighting the staff’s major material and detail areas is also planned once the final asset is ready.

Development Status: Material Authoring — In Progress (emissive pass pending before export)