Honor of Kings 2 - Teaser Demo Reel

(Due to sharing restrictions, you will have to click on the video link to view it on Blur Studio's website.)

The most challenging part about this project was the incredibly short timeline we had to deliver it. Due to scope, there was no way we could do it all as a fully rendered sequence. Instead, it became a series of FX vignettes, with flowing streams of magic revealing and dissolving different portions of in-game lore. It was up to the FX team to invent, prototype, and develop a sufficiently sophisticated treatment of static and animated geometry provided to us by animation, and to seamlessly blend them together into a single tapestry.

There was very little time to divide up specialized tasks, so the three of us who started on the project worked in parallel, prototyping different techniques and bouncing Houdini setups among ourselves whenever we came up with something promising. Lighting and compositing would take our WIP Mantra renders and apply their own treatments to further refine the final look, until we all iteratively arrived at the final look of the trailer seen here.

While I may have been personally tasked with delivering the first and third vignettes listed in the breakdown below, the look dev on this project was truly a joint and communal effort throughout the entire piece.

Breakdown

• 00:00:05 - Flowing rivers of blue magic.
• 00:00:09 - Portal explosion.
• 00:00:10 - Spaceship.
• 00:00:12 - Spaceship dissolve.
• 00:00:16 - Crashed spaceship backdrop and environment.
• 00:00:20 - Nuwa (tall goddess) reveal and dissolve.
• 00:00:21 - Human crowds gathered around Nuwa reveal and dissolve.
• 00:00:23 - Transition to/from rivers of magic.