Revisiting Ulduar: How Radim Hurricane Zeifart Turned WoW Nostalgia into a 5-Minute CGI Masterpiece
Eva Zubec · Brand Director
ULDUAR · TRAILER · GAMING · WOW · HURRICANE · HOUDINI
14 SEP 2026 · 5 MIN READ
When you look at a 5-minute cinematic trailer packed with 95 complex scenes, hundreds of armored characters, and volumetric explosions, you usually expect a massive budget and a studio of hundreds. But at All Animal Studio, our latest Ulduar trailer for World of Warcraft was born out of pure passion for iconic gaming lore and a drive to upgrade our CGI production pipeline.
We sat down with Cinematic Director Radim Zeifart (known as Hurricane in the World of Warcraft community) to talk about revisiting 2009 nostalgia with modern tech, handling massive cinematic scenes with a lean team, and why making a blue star-entity gave him more headaches than huge explosions.
Radim, this isn’t your first journey into World of Warcraft lore. Do you even know how many trailers you’ve created over the years?
I’ve lost the exact count, but it’s somewhere between 15 and 20 trailers. I started way back in 2008 with community-driven projects. Blizzard actually first reached out to me around 2017 after my Naxxramas trailer went viral, but our official collaboration really kicked off around 2021. Over the years, the scope of these trailers has grown massively alongside the technology we use.
What made you want to revisit the Ulduar trailer specifically?
I actually tried to make this trailer twice before, once in 2011 and again in 2016. Both times I had to abandon it because the technology just wasn't there yet. Ulduar came out in 2009 when promo materials were primitive and most players weren't even gaming on HD monitors. I’ve wanted to do a proper version for over a decade. Now, we finally had everything we needed to build it at the scale it deserved.
Working on an independent 5-minute trailer with 95 heavy scenes sounds like a production nightmare. What new tech and tools did you test on this project?
Because we worked in a small team without a massive Hollywood budget, we couldn't just throw brute-force manual labor at it. We had to be smart. We built custom tools and scripts to handle hundreds of rigged characters and armor sets seamlessly. We wrote our own internal render management tool and integrated EmberGen for real-time fire and smoke simulations.
Most importantly, we fully introduced Houdini into our studio pipeline: the same industry-standard software used in Marvel films. Our VFX specialist, Jaroslav Novotny, brought that expertise in, allowing us to execute high-end simulations without breaking our workflow.
Speaking of technical challenges, was there one particular asset or scene that completely broke your brain?
You would think armies and giant explosions would be the nightmare, but Algalon was a total brain-breaker. He is a celestial entity made of glowing constellation matter instead of bones and skin. Achieving that ethereal look while keeping him properly rigged and animated was ridiculously tough. We kept breaking shader setups, messing up keyframes, and restarting his lookdev. Balancing glowing cosmic stars with realistic motion keyframing tested every limit of our patience, but seeing him pop on screen made every single breakdown worth it.
The World of Warcraft community is notoriously detail-oriented. How do you approach fan expectations when releasing a new trailer?
You simply cannot go backward. Every new trailer has to raise the bar in detail, lighting, and pacing because fans instantly sense when you take a shortcut. If you drop the quality even slightly, the community feels it. You have to step up the ladder with every single release.
From the 2009 Icecrown Citadel era to your work with All Animal Studio today, is there still a dream project or lore moment you’d love to direct?
If I had absolute total freedom? The Sunwell patch teaser. I grew up in that era back in 2007, literally running home from school so I could jump online and raid it with my guild. Taking that nostalgic memory and recreating it with our modern studio pipeline, cinematic lighting, and custom Houdini setups would be an absolute dream.
Got a bold vision for your next gaming or commercial campaign?
Projects like the Ulduar trailer act as our internal R&D testbed. We test new rendering setups, script automation, crowd management, and complex VFX in a totally safe environment. When a client comes to us with a tight deadline and a complex CGI brief, they aren't paying for our learning curve. They get a fully stress-tested, streamlined AAA pipeline from day one. We know exactly where the bottlenecks are, how to stretch a budget, and how a lean team can deliver cinematic output that rivals giant international studios.
Huge thanks to Radim for sitting down with us and sharing a look behind the scenes. If you want to catch all his legendary fan creations, make sure to follow Hurricane’s YouTube channel.
We build realistic CGI, game trailers, and high-impact visual experiences using the exact same battle-tested pipeline behind our top-tier cinematic releases. Whether you need high-end VFX, hero character development, or full trailer production, our team is ready to jump in.
Author
Eva Zubec
Brand Director
Connecting world-class 3D artists with global clients and gaming communities, ensuring exceptional craft never goes unnoticed.