About the Artists

Joey Lenz is a Senior Level Lighting Artist at Naughty Dog and Phil Liu is a World Artist working for Monolith Productions. They decided to band together on a personal piece and push their artistic and technical skills to bring real-time artwork one step closer to cinematic quality. Both were first inspired by the Game of Thrones intro armillary sphere found in the show’s opening credits; its intensity, dynamic motion, and composition resounded with them. As they worked on the project, they wanted to maintain its essence, while adding their own artistic interpretation and direction. Since they primarily work in digital, real-time environments, they decided the final image would be rendered with Unreal 4 due to its ease of use and powerful tools.

The project was developed mostly by procedural means. This includes textures, material/particle FX, as well as the animation. Almost all of the textures were made in Substance Designer. The expression-driven animation (armillary sphere and camera jitter), Art Nouveau models, and the rig were created in Maya. Lighting, shader work, post-processing, and material/particle FX were done in Unreal 4.