Realm of Chaos
Game board for Warhammer: Age of Sigmar - Soul Arena
Realm of Chaos
Realm of Chaos is one of a few game board environments made for the handheld autochess Warhammer game; Soul Arena, by Trophy Games. It’s a project of me, Mikkel T. Kristenssen and Shahzeb Rajput over the course of a few months.
It was initially a project taken on by Mikkel, our 3D intern, who did the initial sketching and base modeling / sculpting, but was later taken over by me, where I reworked much of the sculpting, but putting most of the work into the texturing, composition, lighting, shaders and various effects through the board, with some help from Shazeb on particles. You could say me and Mikkel did 50/50 of the work each!
Since it was originally for mobile platform, careful optimization was done for it to be as lightweight as possible, putting all environmental movement and scenic creatures into just a few joints mixed with blend shapes.
First clay sculpt, by Mikkel
Final clay sculpt, by me (chopped up in parts that are re-used)
Closeup of some of the pieces
Base Color screenshot from Painter. It was important to paint light and shadows into the base color, compromising to use as little texture data as possible. We only used Normal and Color
Normal
in Maya
Timeline progress, by Mikkel. At the last image, you can see a big skip in progress, which is basically where I took over!
Soul Arena is an autochess board battler similar to the likes of Dota Underlords or Teamfight Tactics. It was a project with Trophy games in cooperation with Games Workshop that I worked with for around a year, after it later was put on hold.
Here I worked as a 3D generalist, doing all kinds of graphic improvements, such as rigging, animation, VFX, UI animation, with this Chaos realm being one of my main projects, as well as another map that wasn’t released.