Weapons of the Iron Lords

Ever since hearing about the Iron Lords in Destiny, my interest was piqued. After playing Iron Banner, and earning the gear, I wanted to learn more about these mystical figures in the lore of the game, eventually leading me to wanting to do a project based on them somehow. Browsing Bungie's site, I came across the weapons in the armory, and decided that was a good place to start.

The start

Browsing the old armory pages on Bungie.net, I thought it would be a cool idea to have some kind of animation based on the original nine Iron Banner weapons. So I took some screenshots and began to plan it all out.

The Planning

Once the idea came to my head, I say with my sketchbook to flesh out some of the initial idea for the video. These pages came to be my ongoing notes for the project, including intro/outro ideas, render settings, and placements and orders of the weapons.

The Creating

After screen-capping all nine weapons, the next step was to convert them into vector art using shape layers in Adobe Illustrator.

The Importing and Animating

Once a weapon was complete in Illustrator, the next step was to import the .ai file into After Effects. Once Imported, I broke it down into individual shape layers, then grouped sections of the weapons into different compositions to make animating hundreds of shape layers a bit easier.

The Final Product

After hours of creating the vector image, breaking it down into chunks, and animating, it was time to render. I added in some wiggle, the sigil of the weapon bearer's corresponding class, and made a camera movement to give each weapon an extra little effect.