NHTV is a educational institute based in Breda, The Netherland. One of the professional bachelor’s programs is International Game Architecture and Design. This program is divided in four programs: Programmer, Designer and productions, Indie and Visual Art. Team Ignoratio Elenchi consists of Visual Art students who put together ‘Dragon Slayer’ for the AVA (Advanced Visual Arts) course.

The course is divided into 3 blocks: AVA3 (pre-production), AVA4 and AVA2 (production), and AVA5 (post-production).

AVA2 prepares students for production in interactive studios and gives a basic understanding of motion capture as mocap is built into most studio pipelines worldwide. For AVA3 the team’s task was to create a Storyboard for the animation including a rough music/sound/FX/dialogue, visual style guide for the animation, production plans and block out assets, animation tests, SFX tests and test renders. The idea was to create an heroic animation with a twist. After the storyboard and the moving storyboard was created, the next step was motion capture. Motion capture was done using the Xsens MVN system. The mocap data was imported into Autodesk MotionBuilder, Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine.

In the AVA4 and AVA2 course the teams create a pre-production prototype of the animation project. In AVA4 (production phase) the final 3D assets, animations, textures, lighting rigs and camera passes are created to result in a ‘Beauty Pass’ animation (not final):

In the final AVA5 course the team re-created the entire animation with new models, new lighting and more. This all resulted in the final animation the team aimed for, a heroic story with a twist:

All credits for ‘Dragon Slayer’ go to team Ignoratio Elenchi.