Nelson Hurst

Animator · Software engineer · Game developer

Creator of Genryu's Blade. Founder of Studio Tatsu.

Animated short · 2000

Genryu's Blade

Genryu Shino, an assassin, decides to retire and live an ordinary life. There's one small problem. The Yakuza see it as betrayal, and their boss puts a 100 million dollar bounty on his head and on his mysterious dragon blade. Now Genryu must kill again, not for money but to survive. Once an assassin, always an assassin.

  • 40M+views online
  • Showtimeaired on cable television
  • 6 Monthsfrom start to finish
  • 400 MHzthe Pentium II it was made on

Behind the film

  • It went viral years before YouTube existed. First released in October 2000, it was updated and re-released in 2008.
  • In 2000, Macromedia* licensed the original Flash source files for research, to help make Flash more animator-friendly.
  • It was made on a 400 MHz Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM. Those limits cut the planned runtime from 10 minutes to 6.
  • Most of the animation was traced from scanned pencil drawings, using a mouse. Drawing tablets were too expensive back then.
  • Over the years, hundreds of animators working at major studios have written to say it inspired them.

* Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005. Flash, the program the film was made in, is now called Adobe Animate.

And the sequel? Maybe one day. Hollywood would probably call it a reboot.

Animation

More animation

  • Animation Reel 2009

    Character rigging, animation, setup and custom pipeline tools from projects in late 2008 and early 2009. Animated in MotionBuilder, rendered in Maya and composited in After Effects.

  • Geijutsuka vs Nelxon 2, pencil test

    A pencil test for an animation battle with fellow animators on the JoinedArtists forums. Animated in Flash with a Wacom tablet, then finished in After Effects with paper, pencil and sound effects.

Game development

Game Dev

My game development started in ActionScript, building games in Flash, before I moved to XNA, Microsoft's framework for making Xbox 360 and PC games. On XNA I built my own framework while working on my first Xbox indie game, and shared what I learned with other developers along the way.

  • My own XNA 4 framework

    Real-time rendering experiments such as ambient occlusion and depth of field, built on the SunBurn engine's post-processing and running on both Xbox 360 and PC.

  • XNA 3.1 to 4.0 cheat sheet

    A collection of code snippets for moving projects to XNA 4.0. It removed at least 90% of the errors from the breaking changes across more than a dozen of my projects, and other developers adopted it as a conversion guide and reference.

  • XNA Developer's Survival Kit 2

    A curated list of XNA 4.0 libraries, engines, techniques and articles to help developers make better games and custom engines. Because MonoGame keeps XNA alive, it stayed useful for years.

  • Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion (XNA 4)

    Nelxon Game Dev #1, 2011. HBAO in my framework, using the SunBurn engine's post-processing. Fully customizable, at roughly 40 fps or more on Xbox 360 and PC.

  • Depth of Field (XNA 4)

    Nelxon Game Dev #2, 2011. Depth of field in the same framework, exaggerated here so the effect is easy to see. The character is from the skinned model sample on the XNA website.

Years of prototypes like these, in rendering, physics, character animation and vehicles, grew into a full game engine. That engine is the foundation of Studio Tatsu.

About

Nelson Hurst

I’m an independent animator, software engineer and game developer. Before YouTube existed, I created ShockAnime and Genryu’s Blade. Online I’ve also gone by Nelxon, and this site was once Nelxon.com.

These days I run Studio Tatsu, an independent game studio building physics-driven games for PC on our own engine.

Visit Studio Tatsu