As part of a community rendering challenge organized by Pwnisher, I created shaders, effects and models for a base animation. My focus in this this challenge was creating striking stylization with bold colors, to hopefully stand out amidst the many semirealistic renders I expected other people to make.
The style and subject matter of this render were inspired by world and artwork of the Electrum Archives, as well as a large amount of different Magic the Gathering trading cards.
The process involved a lot of back and forth between Blender, where I was creating the assets and lighting, and Godot, where I was adjusting the shaders throughout the process. The style and submission requirements also led me to write a handful of scripts, one of which was to generate an SDF-like noise texture for the VFX, which is random noise that will result in blob-shaped light and dark spots when used as a dithering pattern.
What I created: the lighting and shading, the character props and outfit, the VFX, and the environment. These were also all designed by me.
What I did not create: the camera animation, the card animation and texture, and the character animation (though slightly edited by me) were supplied by and mostly mandatory for the render challenge. The monsters that are briefly visible and the skull props in the landscape were not modelled by me.
