Anduin Wrynn : The War Within Cinematic

Honored to have worked on the production of Anduin Wrynn for our War Within cinematic revealed by Chris Metzen at BlizzCon 2023. Responsible for sculpting and modeling Anduin's iconic cloak. Anna the director wanted this to feel utilitarian and protective against the harsh desert environment so one of the features I added to help push this idea was the 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 breakup 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, and tattering 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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