MAKING A lucid NIGHTMARE
Axis’s Abed Abonamous reveals what it took to create the game trailer for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III
The Dawn of War III teaser
The visually arresting trailer took the Warhammer franchise in a new direction
Axis are no strangers to working on big franchises and have carved out a name for themselves creating dramatic game trailers. With Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III, the team at Axis, led by director Abed Abonamous, needed to stay true to a strict art style of the franchise while pushing the boundaries of what was possible. “We looked at the game art, but also a lot into the extremely deep WH40K lore for inspiration,” explains Abed, who animated the game trailer in Maya with shading, lighting, rendering and FX completed using Houdini. Compositing was done in Fusion. “Instead of going for a self-contained, conventional plot we wanted to take a few steps back and convey the mood of that universe, its futility and gloominess. One of the very first ideas to emerge was the concept of a pile of bodies so large that it resembled a gigantic mountain. By constructing the trailer to start and end with this corpse mountain, we would implicitly hint at the uncaring meat grinder The new trailer from Axis mixes familiar Warhammer design with artistic expression that is the eternal war; the trailer loops onto itself and the same events occur countless times and yet they don’t change much.”
Warhammer 40K has been defined by its ‘grimdark’ aesthetic, and Abed took that on board and married it with the surreal and abstract, yet morbid style of painters such as the late Beksinski.
“In those paintings, beauty goes hand in hand with bleakness and downright absurdity, and the same can be said of Warhammer 40K,” adds Abed. “It’s almost as if these two inspirations were meant for each other but by some freak coincidence had never really been combined before.”
The blend of styles was not without its challenges for the Axis team: “Fine tuning the mood of the trailer to hit a fine line between despair and largerthan-life action was a very demanding task, as was keeping most of the vignettes within the realm of paintings. The latter was achieved by mostly avoiding sweeping camera moves and using centred portrait compositions and extreme wide shots.” Watch the new trailer from Axis at www.dawnofwar.com
new software
Discover the new releases The latest version of Fabric Engine has added Python support to Canvas visual programming, making the system accessible to a wider range of technical directors and technical artists. As an added bonus, Fabric for Modo is part of this release. Watch a demo online here: www.bit.ly/210-fabric Global illumination technology, Enlighten, is stretching out from game development to add arch-viz users to its roster, and Yugen, an Australian firm that specialises in creating life-like, 3D property designs is first to make use of the software. Watch the results here: www.yugen.com.au