Studio Plastic Wax Explains How to Make Zombie Dragons

 

Many visual effects artists get started in the field with the dream that they’ll spend their lives working on awesome projects that involve alien spaceships or brain-eating zombies. Unfortunately, a lot of the time visual effects artists are stuck with slightly less exciting jobs that involve building an apartment building or the interior of a car. But then a client comes along asking for you to create a gigantic zombie dragon and an uncontrollable smile creeps across your face.

The Australian-based design company Plastic Wax was recently tasked with the rather enviable job of creating a trailer for the MMORPG Neverwinter. The trailer is absolutely epic. I usually avoid that word because it’s so overused, but it’s pretty much the only word that fits when you’re talking about a necromancer and a huge dracolich that are laying siege to a fantasy city.

The studio worked with some of the most popular visual effects programs, including 3ds Max, ZBrush, Maya, Photoshop and Nuke. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? It’s always humbling to see what somebody can do with the same art programs that you use on a daily basis.

Dane Maddams, the executive vice president of Plastic Wax, offered a behind-the-scenes look at the work that went into the creation of the trailer: “We were dealing with an epic undead horde and really wanted to give the sense that the undead army was massive. Our in-house tools allowed us to procedurally animate and spawn more than 20 distinct zombie types and populate scenes with thousands of characters at once, each driven by motion-capture data from our own in-house capture suite.”

The thing that I love so much about Plastic Wax’s work is that they told a miniature story. There are three separate trailers — each one has its own mood and is entirely self-contained, but at the same time they depict a single event and tell a larger story. Part one is slow and ominous. Part two is dark and tragic. Part three is heroic and defiant. You could watch any of these trailers by itself and get a good idea of what Neverwinter is like. Watching them all together in order, however, provides a completely new experience.

I think the most important lesson to take away from this is to always keep the bigger picture in mind. Artists can spend so much brain power deciding between the colors #000000 and #000001 that it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for all of the trees. Always keep your overall objective in mind. What’s the mood? What’s the purpose of the art piece? What do the clients want you to showcase in the artwork? Answering these questions in your artwork will ensure that you’ve got a happy client and a fat paycheck!

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