Siege towers, World of Warcraft : Battle for Azeroth
It has been 5 years since I started my career in WoW art team. But still, I want to learn and push my limits.
Building siege towers was a most meaningful task to me during this expansion work.
It was an excellent opportunity to have experience of RayFire physics simulation and fragmentation tool for creating destroy animation. Since I didn't have any knowledge about it, I spent a week of trial and error. It turned out the best destruction I'd ever made.
Since I spent my entire WoW journey with Horde, I had a moment of hesitation when I received 'making Alliance Siege Tower' task. But the cinematic team's work was too fantastic to be delayed. I re-visioned the tower design for the in-game version.
I believed the lion shield is the most essential part of the tower. It is the symbol of Alliance and the primary weapon of the tower. So I used Zbrush for the lion part. I baked the sculpture to low polygon and added more color.
I couldn't stop thinking about the destroying animation. 'How can this massive structure explode? How would I create a believable explosion?' Tech team provided fantastic physics simulation tool, RayFire.I put 3 exploding points for believable animation.
As a proud member of Horde. I wished I kept working this tower FOREVER.
For the Horde!!
The original design had started from Robert Sevilla. He drew an incredible battering ram for Horde. I added more Horde-ish details on my sketch.
I didn't want to harm any Horde property. I didn't like to yield this destruction task to other prop artists, who play Alliance. :(
I had to destroy my creation.
It wasn't that difficult to animate since I knew RayFire pretty well.