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Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Animated my ideas of Golden Card Animations for some of the new KoFT cards

Hearthstone's golden card animations have always been one of my favorite aspects of the game, so I thought I'd use my motion graphics skills to create my own versions of what I think the golden card for the new expansion could look like!

http://imgur.com/a/QIiUo

  • Hadidjah
    Posted 8 years, 4 months ago (Source)

    Oh man I've definitely been looking around for open positions but I didn't see a spot on their Hearthstone team

    If golden animations in particular are your jam, definitely keep making and posting them! We aren't currently looking for goldens artists, but we found our latest goldens guy because he was doing the same sort of thing you are, and when we were talking with him he mentioned having gotten interest from several other studios looking to create a similar sort of effect. (It probably wouldn't be listed as Goldens Artist, admittedly, as far as traditional game roles go it's closest to but not-quite-actually an FX Artist or possibly Shader / Material Artist, if that helps your hunt at all.) Best of luck! :)

  • Hadidjah
    Posted 8 years, 4 months ago (Source)

    I absolutely will! I loved making these and plan to keep at it (as well as explore other similar animation projects).

    Would you happen to know which program Blizzard's golden artist uses? I made these in Photoshop and After Effects but I've seen examples of other artists using shaders within Unity to achieve the same effect (which would make a lot sense).

    We use Unity for just about everything, including these, which are powered through a layered shader and mask. All the masks and textures are done in Photoshop, same as you're already doing, but it's just those two programs. If you aren't comfortable writing a custom shader in code (because they're terrifying:P), you can also pick up ShaderForge from the Unity Asset Store or create these in Unreal instead, which comes with a really excellent node-based material editor. The other bonus of working in one of those two engines is that experience in either is really valuable on applications, and puts you in a much better position to just drop into a studio's real-time/game pipeline (both Unity and Unreal are extremely common in game studios).

    This article (apologies if you've seen it before) is a mostly-philosophical overview of the goldens process, but the breakdown of the utilization of the different mask channels in that first 'Creating All That Glitters' section is really core to how we build out goldens.

    On the more practical side, this video delves into actually recreating a golden card shader in Unity, and although it doesn't account for the channel mask mentioned above, it'll get you pretty close. :)

    GLHF, looking forward to seeing more!

  • Hadidjah
    Posted 8 years, 4 months ago (Source)

    Oh man, I couldn't have asked for a better resource. My background is much deeper in motion graphics/vfx for film and digital media than for games, but I've always been interested in learning so this gives me a good stepping in point!

    Seriously thanks so much!

    Happy to try and help! :) If you're more interested in film and pre-rendered work, then it sounds like you're already setting yourself up really well - I don't know near as much about film as games, but I know they use a heck of a lot more AfterEffects than games do, so you're on the right track there. If VFX and explosions are also interesting, you might also take a look at Nuke's non-commercial version and/or Houdini Apprentice (if you haven't already, I mean), but as far as I know about motion graphics it sounds like you're already doing a lot of things right.

    Cheers friend!

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