Among many other buildings Ents in Tree Tag will need this one - the
Speed Crystal.
Initially there was only a Doodads\Icecrown\Rocks\Icecrown and bla-bla-bla crystal with no animation, base and team color, just a mere doodad.
Here I quickly combined a platform that Ancients use for their 'Morph' animation with the crystal. I also repositioned the roots, added a few curly smaller roots and left them with one-sided material so that when you look through the crystal you don't see the roots' inner parts
Time for TC but we'll make some "fake" TC.
When the model lacks detailed geosets just copy some parts of them you may find suitable, separate them and make the TC layer a bit above.
So here I copies the root parts, made them a TC layer, picked the bottom vertices (the top were left attached to the model, see the gif) and moved them up. Then I adjusted the size and shape so these TC parts look like they are in-built.
And here is the result:
Make sure to check this in-game or in the Sanity because sometimes when you put parts too close to each other they can glitch!
I decided to use the Ancient of Lore texture for the TC from its staff. It looks like a cloth wrapped around the root. Seems quite fitting
Here I put this building (just by simply copy-pasting it) into another building that has a 'Stand Work' sequence, stuff like Night Elven birth attachment point, rally point, collision and so on. Before deleting the previous building's geosets I set the visibility (because you can copy geoset's visibility, ez) and also left the 'Stand Work' particle emitter (that already has proper animation timings) for the latter
The building must have a square base and should be not much wider than a standard Moon Well. Here I can also adjust the height and see how deep the base of the building should stay under the ground (when you put buildings on cliffs their underground base details show up).
And of course I couldn't resist adding some bushes:
Definitely looks fresher now!
Let's go for our 'Stand Work' sequence.
There could be A LOT OF variations with various particle effects, glowing, texture animation and so on. But it's very important to keep the balance. I think I like this simple "wisp" glow effect thing and will remove the particles that go up.
And some in-game tests:
From this perspective, I realized that some details needed to be done differently or removed altogether. So I got rid of the fourth root with bushes which was behind the crystal.
Then I the revealed the crystal more to the eye by making it higher and by stertching the whole building: in the end, this building is more about the crystal than its roots and foliage.
And here we finally go:
A nice Night Elven pylon, isn't it?
Wait a second. I got some great advice from
@Vinz and added a drop of his talent here:
That's what I call team work

Thank you, @Vinzerino!