Valorant World Championship Cup
2021 brought the inaugural championship tournament for Riot Games’ newest title Valorant, and with that world stage came the necessity to craft an iconic emblem for the winning teams to hold aloft. Riot came to Volpin Props for both conceptual as well as physical design to be revealed at the first ever Valorant Championship Tournament in Berlin.
For concept work we tapped a longtime friend of the studio Jonah Lobe, a master at storytelling through design. Together with Riot, dozens of 2D iterations were refined into the finished result seen here.
The trophy itself is one of the most technically complicated elements in our portfolio. Standing at 2 feet tall, a pair of mirrored vortices collide around a Radianite Cube; a core component of the Valorant lore and a central theme to the parallel universes in which the game takes place. At the trophy top, 24k gold is split with Radianite fissures while a mirrored tower of Radianite is run through with gold veins at the base. Both cones were fabricated using cutting-edge 3D printing techniques, then traditionally sculpted onto a welded steel cube at the center. After completing the sculpting work the entire piece was copper plated, followed by rhodium then 24k gold.
Our Radianite Cube itself is an object of note simply for the level of complexity required in its creation. Modeled after black tourmaline, a single digitally-sculpted piece of Radianite seems to float inside a mirrored box. This piece is suspended in crystal-clear urethane, hand sanded to a mirror shine and polished over the course of an entire day to ensure complete optical clarity. Once set into the frame of the trophy, the polished sides are both mirrors as well as clear windows depending on your angle of observation.
We’re very excited to see the finished sculpture on stage at the Valorant Championship and look forward to exploring the mirror universes with Riot as this game continues to grow.
