The March of the Machine cinematic, set in the world of the renowned card game Magic: The Gathering, was produced by Axis Animation. As a 3D generalist, I was responsible for creating environment assets, specifically the modeling and texturing of Elesh Norn’s throne and the spires.

This project was particularly challenging due to the complex nature of the environment. Achieving the perfect balance between soft, organic tissue and solid, bone-like structures required close collaboration with concept artists, the art director, and the 3D team.

Each asset presented unique challenges. The throne, for example, had to be carefully modeled to accommodate Elesh Norn’s mocap animation while staying true to the concept art and maintaining proper proportions, layout, and camera placement.

The spires posed a different challenge: their visual language was finalized relatively late in production due to time constraints, which meant the final model had to be created from scratch in just a few days — a process that had previously taken weeks in earlier iterations.