This 2.5D project was an amazing collaboration with the passionate and wonderful Blizzard animation team! It both kept us engaged and interested as artists, while also pushing us to learn new workflows and giving us the experience of handling bigger 2.5D projects. Our artists handled it brilliantly, and together with the amazing team on Blizzard's end, we got to be a part of bringing one of the latest Overwatch 2 heroes to life. 

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For this project we worked on everything from the color script for the animation, to all the 2D art and layer preparation before Blizzard animation team really got things moving. 

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We started off with the color script and we iterated our ideas carefully to ensure that the coming animation would feel as good and consistent as possible. The color and emotions needed to not only match Niran’s character, but also convey the importance of his beliefs. With the guidance of the Blizzard team, we finally settled on the script you can see below.

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After setting the color script, we moved on towards creating the scenes for the animation. Here, the key was having solid work to build our images on, for which Blizzard provided an animatic to ensure we captured all the different pieces inside each scene that would require animation later on. Layer by layer, and piece by piece, the scenes were carefully painted. We took extra care over Niran, his different poses, his expressions, and all separate pieces, throughout his journey towards becoming Lifeweaver.

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Finally, after much anticipation from our end, we got to see the final result of The Lifeweaver when he was announced. We couldn’t have been happier by the final product and really seeing everyone’s hard work come to life. The reveal trailer you can find below.

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