Rampage Rally
Submission
This was the second Pwnisher Create with Clint community challenge I joined. I wanted to go against what I felt was going to be the norm for the Rampage Rally challenge; it opened with suggestions of car rally animations and classic drift scenes. My choice to go with fantasy lay in my inspirations from Lord of the Rings and the fantasy series Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.
My original idea was different. I knew the hero character had to be on horseback, I knew there had to be a magic element somewhere. The core of the story in this version is an army of the undead storming some kind of magic, holy city. There was magic sigils that the hero character would break through. The scene inevitably went through many changes.
This was my third layout test, and the one that I felt was most successful. The basic shape language of the foreground castle matched that of the castle walls I had in mind. As well as the layers of the city, they felt populated enough to feel real.
By this point most of the modeling was done for the castle and the castle towers. I had dedicated a lot of my time fine-tuning my original hero animations for the horse and its rider. It had taken me about a week hand animating both the horse and its rider to get it to a place I thought looked convincing.
VFX and simulations are an area I'm still developing, but the art direction here was deliberate. I wanted the flames to read as "soul fire." The strong color contrast between the warm light of the castle and the cold green of the undead ships was something I pushed intentionally to sell the distinction between the living and the dead
With the different layers coming together, it was time to move into compositing. I separated the scene into foreground, midground, background, and character animation passes. Rendering them separately gave me significantly more control over volumetrics and lighting in each area of the frame.
I wanted to push myself with this challenge. My work usually leans toward sci-fi and brutalist aesthetics, so fantasy was already a departure — but I also anticipated that most entries would go the expected route, and I wanted to stand apart. I'm proud of what I achieved here. Looking back, there's plenty I'd approach differently: the smoke and magic compositing, the texture work, the simulations. But that's the point of a challenge — you find out exactly where your edges are.