Path of Exile 2 (Logo)

I'd first like to shoutout Mike Franchina for the concept for the creature design.
I altered the design a bit to work more for what I was after here, in two halves joined together initially, the socketed "crystal eyes"
https://www.artstation.com/sirfrancisdrake

This project was started out of necessity internally at GGG where I had a real stick up my butt about getting us a new logo for the new game. After working in graphic design for 10 years previous to my games job, I was kind of sick of this gross trend of oversimplifying logos for things into these primitive soulless things with no character. For insurance companies and things, whatever. But for games, I think it's important they have character.

Path of Exile's logo is a bit odd, but it has that character and I wanted to maintain it, and rather than go more minimal....maximal. Full maximalist. Hand sculpted statues and every little nook and cranny with something to look at. Something that looks mysterious and arcane and almost forbidden.

So that's what we've got.

I had some help on the sculpt of the statues by my colleague Hoko. It was important to try and get a good balance and assymetry yet symmetry between them. https://www.artstation.com/inglourious_hoko

Outside of that I handled almost all aspects of creation, the design, modeling, texturing, rigging animation, vfx, after effects and compositing. Entirely done within 3DS Max using Tyflow, Vray/Phoenix FD. Sculpts in Zbrush, textures in Painter.

Fun fact: I was in the office at 1am manually rendering and fixing frames for this right up until the hand off. This thing chewed through a serious amount of hard drive space just on all the frames of mesh data of everything. One kind of unintentional but cool thing I embraced, was how the video is very grainy in the beginning, but becomes very clean in the end. Ultimately rendering through all the layers of sub surface and smoke and stuff was getting really heavy and hard to manage, so I embraced a noisier render with more distortion and colour strangeness to make it feel "corrupted", and when the text slams in everything cleans up more pristine.