Crow: The Legend

Crow: The Legend is a VR experience from Baobab Studios. I had the opportunity to do production design for the project. It was a very interesting challenge because we wanted a bunch of very soft characters in a very soft environment while being limited by VR render times. Fur and soft edges are extremely expensive and I needed to come up with a style that has a similar effect without the cost. Through this exploration process it occurred to me that the only that the only thing that is important to making something feel soft is to get a soft silhouette. So, after this realization we cut the fur and instead built a dither style of art and shader that eats in the silhouettes of objects based on where the audience is looking in the scene. This softens the silhouette only and gives us a soft feel in a hard polygonal world at a very low cost.

Crow: The Legend just won four Emmy awards including one for special individual achievement for Production Design for this approach.