Anduin Wrynn : The War Within Cinematic

Honored to have participated in the production of Anduin Wrynn for our recent cinematic revealed by Chris Metzen at BlizzCon 2023. My responsibility was to sculpt and model Anduin's iconic War Within cloak. I was given artistic freedom to design the look, how it's worn, and dictate the folds and layering. The director Anna wanted this to feel utilitarian and protective against the harsh desert environment. One of the features I added to help push this idea was getting that tight, snug layering of material wrapped around his neck. Careful attention was paid to the type of folds, tension, and layering to express a tough cloth material. Creation process was a combination of sculpting, simulation, and modeling. The cloak had challenges as it needed to simulate and react to physics properly down the pipeline, so everything had to be modeled physically correct with zero interpenetrating geo, including all the art directed folds and layering to avoid any popping and breaking once simulation ran. The tattering and holes along the frayed edges were also modeled by hand, and later augmented by Surfacing with additional texture support. No displacement was used on the cloak, everything you see is true geometry, making the model quite dense in order to get all the folds, layering, tattering, and everything represented. This forced us to push the limits of how dense the geometry for simulation can be, but resulted in a much more realistic outcome.

Shoutout to my Lead Jason Huang who gave invaluable feedback along the creation process. He was also the lead on Anduin's model for this cinematic. Surfacing and textures were done by the great James Ma. The piece was Directed by Anna Morgan, Art Directed by Jason Fleming, and DFX Supervised by David Satchwell. I've played WoW since I was 16 so getting to work on Anduin for a prerender cinematic like this has been a dream come true.

Everything on screen is a collaborative effort with a small army of insanely passionate and talented human beings.

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