Hurricane ft. ALL ANIMAL™/ Ulduar Trailer

The original 2009 promo assets for Ulduar never did justice to the Titan complex. To fix that, our Cinematic Director Radim "Hurricane" Zeifart and his team turned a long-awaited passion project into an aggressive internal R&D testbed: rebuilding the iconic raid into a 5-minute, 95-shot cinematic titan without an oversized budget or a 100-person team.

Scaling from the 53 shots of Black Temple to 95 shots in Ulduar meant handling hundreds of character models, complex armor sets, and massive atmospheric effects simultaneously. The ultimate technical hurdle? Rigging and animating Algalon the Observer, a character composed entirely of ethereal, star-textured cosmic matter where traditional animation pipelines completely broke down.

To handle 95 complex shots with a lean core team, we transformed the production into a live R&D testbed. We engineered proprietary Python and VS Code scripts for render management and asset automation, enabling seamless control over hundreds of rigged characters and armor sets across the Titan complex.

We formally integrated Houdini into our studio pipeline for high-end cinematic simulations, combining it with EmberGen for real-time fire and destruction effects. Rendering across four RTX 4090 GPUs in Cinema 4D and Octane allowed us to master cosmic shader physics and large-scale architectural rendering with maximum efficiency.

Rendered over 2 months on four RTX 4090s, the Ulduar trailer delivered an epic community tribute while serving as a massive upgrade for our commercial engine. Because we stress-tested Houdini, crowd automation, and render scripts on our own dime, prospective clients get a pre-tested, highly optimized CGI pipeline that drastically reduces production costs and delivery times.