Riot Games League of Legends: Pantheon, Senna and Aphelios VFX Art Blast

By Daniel Wade - December 19, 2019

Hi everyone! The Champion team is excited to welcome you to our end of year Art Blast. This time, we want you to experience the step-by-step process we use to take champions from initial concept to what we see in game. It’s truly been one of our most exciting years, we hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have.

Danny Kim
Associate Art Director, Riot Games

Schedule

Monday December 16: Concept Art/Illustration
Tuesday December 17: Character Art
Wednesday December 18: Animation
Thursday December 19: VFX
Friday December 20: Pre-season Reveal

VFX

2019 has been a wild year for Champions! Five new additions with four updates to complete a total of 9 Champions this year. The team completed 24 unique skins that needed some kind of VFX treatment, for a total of 33 exciting new FX skins in League. I highly encourage you to check out the other previous Riot Art Blasts if you haven’t already! This time we’re structuring by discipline, so I’m here as the FX Lead of Champions to introduce the amazing work on Pantheon, Senna, and Aphelios.

Pantheon bridges elements from Runterra’s Mt. Targon which use star, and constellation shapes to denote their power source. One particulate challenge was bridging the magical source of power into the physicality that Pantheon’s kit needed. In the Dragon Slayer Pantheon skin his ultimate grows huge dragon wings as he flies in with a wave of fire for his new ultimate

Senna’s is another champion who uses the Black Mist. Stencil tech was used heavily to represent different areas of visibility to really immerse yourself in the vision shroud the black mist provides. Senna was tied into the World beat this year which was a new music group called True Damage. Senna’s skin pulled in popping shapes, halftone treatment, and heavy use of chromatic aberration.

Aphelios was the last new Champion to release this year. Aphelios has five guns he can rotate between which all do slightly different attacks in isolation and in combination totaling 147 unique VFX! Aphelios’ launch skin was Nightbringer. His gravitum gun has ghostly hands that materialize to grab marked targets.

I hope you have all enjoyed the work of the team in 2019. We’ll definitely be back with a whole lot of awesome VFX next year so stay tuned!

Shannon McSheehan
VFX Art Lead, Riot Games