This is the final video created by our amazing scrappy team, I will walk you trough the story of how it happened.
We had very limited resources, so I created this test in Blender in one evening to see if it would be possible to create an entire video with 1 or 2 artists.
Now Jason Hendrich ( 3D animator) and Matt C( creative lead) joined the project.
The three of us played around with animation and timing, with Matt focusing on the interaction between sound and visual to give the piece more impact.
I was gradually replacing the assets with better iterations that matched Noxian architecture better. At this stage I started working on shaders in Maya and Redshift, (Notice how at first it's really janky and the glossiness is inconsistent on materials).
This is just a breakdown to show how after painting over and relighting the painting, I broke it down to layers and projected it onto cards in Blender. I could do it in After effects but I dislike the process of camera projection.
A lot of work went into the VFX, I had help from Adam Olivera who created an amazing animated texture for the wings and Andru Phoenic on comp and atmosphere. Medhi (2D animator) created hair and lightning.
2D hair was cut ( it clashed with the style).
Teaser for the VGU ( visual game-play update) of Swain ( League of Legends)
Make sure to follow the amazing Jason Hendrich over at :https://www.artstation.com/jasonhendrich
This project took 2 months ( 1 month of preparation, 1 month for production).
It was really intense, fun and challenging. I always joked around that I'm "a CG generalist who happens to draw", but this was an opportunity to actually proof it out. I was involved from the story pitches, to working on VO with the actors, all the way to the final delivery to the editor for localisation into all the 19 languages.
This took a lot of effort to establish a hybrid style where the stylized 3D model would blend well with PBR shaders and raytracing, while not clashing against 2.5D effects and hand-painted matte paintings.
Shout out to everyone involved in the project !
Credit goes to the champ team for creating the character of Swain and original model.