# 3. Weenies, Landmarks and Lighting as Wayfinding Part of [[ProBuilder Gray-Boxing and Landmarks]]. Prev: [[2. Blockout Workflow and Metrics]]. Next: [[4. Beat-Chart to Gray-Box]]. Level 9 in [[Level Up! (Review)]] asks you to design like a theme park: **show the destination early**, guide with **sightlines and landmarks**, hide the backstage. Summaries of the chapter commonly call the tall attractor a **"weenie"** (Walt Disney's term for the castle you see from the parking lot). The review asks you to **verify the term in the book** before you treat the word as Rogers' own; the *idea* is in the chapter either way. The same idea is already applied to Terrain in [[4. Level Design with Terrain - Landmarks and Sightlines]]. This part is the interior / plaza version, in ProBuilder, with lights doing part of the pointing. ## 3.1 What a weenie has to do - Be **readable from the entrance** (and, ideally, from the previous beat's exit). - Be **unique in silhouette** (a cone or cylinder among boxes is enough at gray-box stage). Yellow / gold in the color language. - Be a **place you will actually go**, or a landmark you navigate *by* (a bell tower you walk toward, even if the door is at its feet). - Not be a lie. A golden tower with no route is worse than no tower. Secondary landmarks (a unique arch, a hanging sign, a trashcan fire - [[2.Worked Effect - Trash Can Fire]]) mark fingers and dead-ends. Every finger needs a reward, even a small one. ## 3.2 Lighting as wayfinding You do not need a baked GI pass to teach this. A handful of realtime lights in the blockout are a design tool; [[Lighting and Baking]] is how you make them cheap later. | Cue | Blockout recipe | What it says | |---|---|---| | Warm key on the weenie | A Spotlight or a slightly emissive yellow material on the tower only | "This is the destination" | | Cooler, dimmer path | Lower intensity along optional side rooms | "This is secondary" | | Doorway brightness | A light just beyond a dark threshold | "Come through here" (the classic sightline) | | Hazard | Red vertex color plus a low point light, or no light in a pit | "Not safe" | | Backstage | No light, magenta collision, camera should never see it | Hidden service space | Rules of thumb: - Contrast does more than brightness. A moderately lit tower at the end of a darker street reads better than everything at full white. - Do not compete. One dominant warm accent per view. - If the player needs a pickup to proceed, light *the door they will return to* as well as the pickup. Level 9 foreshadowing: show the goal, then the way. - Quest 2 / mobile: treat these lights as temporary. Budget them in [[Lighting and Baking]] / [[6. Quest Performance Budgets]] before you ship the art pass. A gray-box may use more realtime lights than the final scene. An unlit / vertex-color ProBuilder shader (from the URP samples) will *not* respond to lights the way a Lit shader does. For wayfinding tests, put a **Lit** (or sample Lit-with-vertex-color, if the sample includes one - confirm after import) material on the weenie and the doorway reveal, and leave the rest on the cheaper vertex-color material. If the sample does not provide a lit vertex-color shader, use a standard URP Lit material on landmarks only. ## 3.3 A sightline check A cheap Editor / Play Mode test: from a named viewpoint (the entrance), can a ray reach the weenie without hitting a wall? ```csharp using UnityEngine; /// <summary> /// Reports whether a landmark is visible from a viewpoint. /// NOT compiled in Unity. Pair with the Terrain sightline checker if you already have it. /// </summary> public sealed class LandmarkSightline : MonoBehaviour { [SerializeField] Transform viewpoint; [SerializeField] Transform landmark; [SerializeField] LayerMask blockers; [SerializeField] Vector3 landmarkAimOffset = new Vector3(0f, 2f, 0f); public bool IsLandmarkVisible() { if (viewpoint == null || landmark == null) return false; Vector3 start = viewpoint.position; Vector3 end = landmark.position + landmarkAimOffset; Vector3 delta = end - start; float dist = delta.magnitude; if (dist < 0.001f) return true; return !Physics.Raycast(start, delta / dist, dist, blockers, QueryTriggerInteraction.Ignore); } #if UNITY_EDITOR void OnDrawGizmosSelected() { if (viewpoint == null || landmark == null) return; bool ok = IsLandmarkVisible(); Gizmos.color = ok ? Color.yellow : Color.red; Gizmos.DrawLine(viewpoint.position, landmark.position + landmarkAimOffset); } #endif } ``` If the line is red from the entrance, you do not have a weenie; you have a prop hiding behind a wall. Cut a window, raise the tower, or move the entrance. The Terrain note's checker is the same idea outdoors; do not maintain two incompatible definitions of "visible" in one project if you can share one component. ## 3.4 Exercise Build a 20 m corridor that bends once, with a gold cone visible *over* the bend from the start (a raised weenie), and a lit doorway at the end of the second leg. If the player has to hug a wall to see the destination, raise the landmark, do not add a map marker. ## Sources - [[Level Up! (Review)]] Level 9 - [[4. Level Design with Terrain - Landmarks and Sightlines]] - [[Lighting and Baking]]