Arnold’s Powerhouse Rendering for Riot’s Worlds 2021 Show Open

The animated fantasy world of Arcane collides with musical performances by leading contemporary artists to introduce Riot Games’ Worlds 2021, the ultimate League of Legends eSports championships. Under the creative direction of Possible, global facilities joined forces to create the cinematic show open, blending traditional VFX sequences, live-action music videos, and stylized painterly animation in dark and atmospheric environments. Tasked with managing creative oversight of the production and delivering more than 45 shots within a tight 10-week timeline, Possible depended upon an Arnold-based pipeline to aid in the creation and final rendering of the stunning visual spectacle.

While the Worlds 2021 opening ceremony was initially conceived as a live performance in Shenzhen, China, complications from the pandemic forced the team to re-envision the show open as a cinematic short film. Drawing inspiration from “Arcane: League of Legends,” the Netflix animated series produced by Fortiche, the team reconceived the opener as a mesh of show characters, environments, and story points, combined with music video performances by Imagine Dragons, JID, Denzel Curry, Bea Miller, and PVRIS. To blend the various elements together, the team established a unifying design principle to omit specularity, which guided the project's overall look.

Eddie Paz, article - Arnold’s Powerhouse Rendering for Riot’s Worlds 2021 Show Open

Creative Director and 3D Supervisor Trevor Kerr shared, “Everything is painted diffuse only – so when we started painting sets and handling real world fabrics, we painted in all the highlights by hand. The 3D was treated in the same way, which helped unify the worlds. We then established distinct palettes for the various environments. For example, we used varying shades of green in developing the look of Zaun, an underworld city bathed in the toxic runoff of Piltover, a greater sister city shining on a hill.”

Eddie Paz, article - Arnold’s Powerhouse Rendering for Riot’s Worlds 2021 Show Open

Art Leads Aaron Covrett and Nick Scarcella headed the development of fully realized 3D environments for the two animated sequences managed by Possible’s in-house team. In developing each environment, they were tasked with recreating the painterly look from the “Arcane” series, while figuring out the best method for lighting scenes without using specular information. Each environment required props to build out the 3D space with enough depth and parallax, and Covrett and Scarcella liaised closely with a team of modelers, textures, and lighters throughout development. Because the team’s artists and lighters were primarily Cinema4D (C4D) based, it became apparent that C4D would need to be the hub lighting tool. This was a unique decision, and the team was able to use C4DtoA to extend the functionality of C4D to accommodate a production of scale.


Kerr added, “We built our pipeline for this job in a week using Arnold as the backbone, and we were moving so fast and low to the ground that having a tool that allowed us to exponentially scale in a controlled way was invaluable. Through Arnold’s operator networks, we were able to quickly set up a very straightforward and clean working environment where lighters could come in and do their work without needing to touch or adjust any other elements. Bringing new functionality and a new work environment to C4D, a tool that our lighters were already familiar with and comfortable using, was hands down the thing that made the show work. Arnold and its operator networks were truly the MVPs of the show.”

Eddie Paz, article - Arnold’s Powerhouse Rendering for Riot’s Worlds 2021 Show Open

Arnold’s capabilities for deferred load rendering of geometry and textures were also critical for the project, which offered an interactive experience for lighting. “Each scene didn’t really exist until you pressed ‘go’ on the IPR or ‘render.’ Everything was sourced in through Arnold, either from the operator networks or procedurals. The only components in the scene prior to rendering were the character alembics and cameras. We rendered the show several times over with different lighting iterations. Because the heart of our pipeline was render time geometry – like the deferred loading of all components – we were able to create really interactive scenes that enabled us to iterate very quickly and submit several different versions over the course of a day,” shared Kerr.

Eddie Paz, article - Arnold’s Powerhouse Rendering for Riot’s Worlds 2021 Show Open

Additionally, leveraging Arnold’s scene description setup enabled the team to have globally distributed prop and character files that could be automatically updated in a scene, which was extremely beneficial in a remote workflow with artists located across global time zones. Covrett shared, “We were very conscious of the dangers of last-minute updates, and because of our timeline, we knew we’d potentially be adjusting character animations up to the day before delivery (if need be). We developed our pipeline in a way that would allow us to seamlessly update assets, without having to dive into 40 different shots to make an adjustment to a single texture. Arnold played a key role in enabling that level of flexibility, which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.”

Eddie Paz, article - Arnold’s Powerhouse Rendering for Riot’s Worlds 2021 Show Open

Arnold also enabled the team to include various character states within a single mesh, rather than using separate character models as alembics. “Depending on the action of the shot, for example, a character’s hair may have two or three different versions, such as up, down, or underneath a hood. Through Arnold, we were able to keep everything unified under a single file. At the scene level, the artists could change character traits and versions on the fly without needing to go back to animation. That was all happening through the operator networks, which Arnold was managing in the background,” said Scarcella.


Ahead of delivery, the team planned out the project with Arnold’s precise accuracy showing that it would take four days for final render. They ultimately finished ahead of schedule, delivering one day before the deadline and two days prior to the air date.


Executive Producer Ryan Chung concluded, “An army of people worked very hard on this project, and with the timeline so tight, it couldn’t have been possible without Arnold or our amazing team of 1300 people across vendors. Trust was a huge component of this. We took a lot of leaps of faith with our team and Arnold pipeline, and in the end, we were able to land incredibly well and deliver an impressive cinematic production of great scale.”

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