Maxon Tools Power 2024 Emmy Award Main Title Design Winners and Nominees Honoring the visual excellence of main title designs for Shōgun, Fallout, 3 Body Problem, and Lessons in Chemistry, crafted with Maxon tools.

Maxon proudly extends its congratulations to the winner and nominees of the 2024 Creative Arts Emmy® Award for Outstanding Main Title Design. Shōgun, the winner of this year’s prestigious award and created by design studio Elastic, along with the nominees Fallout, 3 Body Problem, and Silo, created by design studio Antibody, showcase the exceptional artistry and innovation within the television industry and how Maxon tools can help bring these extraordinary stories to life.

Raoul Marks, senior designer at Antibody, explains the importance of high-quality and intuitive software to be able to realize artistic visions in this industry, “In essence, I think it’s the artist that creates the distinct aesthetic a show requires; the software’s role is to get out of the way and make that process as simple as possible. Cinema 4D is great at this in that it’s very versatile, so there’s always a way to achieve a desired visual concept. But then it’s also simple and user-friendly enough to make those steps not overly convoluted. It’s an artist's tool, and I love it for the speed in which it lets me get the images in my head down on the digital page.”

The creation of the award-winning Shōgun title sequence was brought to life entirely in Cinema 4D, with key props like the samurai helmet meticulously crafted in ZBrush to match existing assets from the show. The production team at Elastic relied on Cinema 4D's robust set of tools for every aspect of the project, from design and simulations to final rendering. Its intuitive interface and powerful features, such as MoGraph, bullet physics, and the fracture object, allowed for dynamic elements like sand and rocks without the need for costly simulations.

Incorporating themes from 1600s Japan and inspired by the zen garden's arrangement and significance from the show, they used the fragile nature of the sand garden to represent the turmoil and fleeting political powers of the time. With Cinema 4D, they brought this vision to life, particularly through the dynamic sand simulations enhanced by the RealFlow plugin, which allowed for millions of particles to interact realistically.

The software’s versatility enabled the team to achieve both creative freedom and technical precision, producing the zen garden’s ever-shifting landscape while ZBrush provided the necessary detail and realism for the props, bringing the historical and symbolic richness of Shōgun to life. As Elastic’s director, Nadia Tzuo, explained, "Cinema 4D has been central to our production process. Its user-friendly and robust set of tools, along with a vast array of third-party plugins, allowed us to handle almost every aspect of the project within the program."

For Fallout, set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where citizens live in underground bunkers, Antibody aimed for a graphical silhouette aesthetic that was greatly enhanced by Cinema 4D's recent improvements in viewport rendering capabilities. The team could work in real-time within the editor, allowing them to quickly render full production-quality sequences without relying on raytracing. This efficiency was crucial as they developed eight unique sequences for the show, requiring only a fog pass with subtle foreground lighting to maintain the desired graphical sensibility. However, the evolving storylines and numerous Easter eggs meant these sequences underwent countless iterations. Thanks to Cinema 4D's improved real-time rendering in the ‘Viewport Render’ tab, the team could efficiently iterate on the sequences, with features like supersampling and antialiasing allowing for rapid preparation of viewport renders in production-quality format, significantly streamlining Antibody’s workflow.

In Silo, set in a dystopian future where thousands live in a massive underground silo, Antibody created a haunting title sequence featuring ghostly figures navigating the complex’s labyrinthine corridors. This full-CG sequence posed the challenge of generating hundreds of subtle apparitions, achieved by using low-resolution models with baked-in walk cycles, exported as Alembic files. Cinema 4D's robust handling of Alembic and its ability to clone numerous instances allowed the team to place these figures into the scene with time offsets along walking paths. By rendering the figures with motion blur and long exposure in Octane, they created ethereal trails of human movement that subtly hinted at the silo's unsettling, ancient history. Cinema 4D's efficiency in managing such large-scale instancing and iteration made this essential storytelling effect possible.

In 3 Body Problem, based on the bestselling novel about humanity’s contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, Antibody faced the technical challenge of creating an infinite zoom effect that transitions seamlessly from the microscopic details of synapses in a human brain to skyscrapers, planets, and vast cosmic scenes. Cinema 4D's robust scene rescaling tools, combined with its integration with After Effects, made managing these complex, evolving scales much more efficient. The ability to quickly visualize dense static meshes with render instancing enabled the team to handle a large number of scenes within a single file. By leveraging Cinema 4D's flexibility, the team could continuously reshape and refine the sequences, leading to a visually stunning representation of the show's expansive, science-driven narrative.

“Maxon is proud to support and celebrate the creativity showcased by the exceptional work of this year's nominees and winners, who have set a high bar for excellence in visual storytelling,” says Maxon CEO, David McGavran. “It’s an honor to see our tools play a role in the development of these stunning title sequences and we are continuously striving to equip artists with the means to realize their boldest visions.”