This basically the result of me, screwing around for three full weeks, putting a new GTX 1660 through its paces. (I long for the day when actual artists, and not bitcoin miners, are the chief purchasers of graphics cards again. This is on you, Nvidia!)
The moose itself is a goofy mashup between Doom's cyberdemon and a moose from Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (an excellent roguelike that kind of came out of the woodwork). Rather than starting with a generated and roughly humanoid mesh, I was pretty free-form about it, done mostly with extrusion modeling and a lot of patience.
The rest of the material in the lab may have future uses as quick props; it was all done in its own file and then appended to the master. I got some experience with volumetrics, such as with the laser beam and the shoulder-cannon grenade explosions; which had their actual volumes rendered in independent files, generally with a smoke or fire simulator, and then baked and exported to OpenVDB animations. After that, they were imported into the final project as volumes. Appropriate vertex parenting and transformations were applied, along with custom volumetric materials, and then the animation itself was timed with keyframes.
Most of the audio was purchased from my account on Sounds.com. I was tempted to just use the Cyberdemon theme, but I couldn't figure out how Bethesda would feel about that and I'm not sure everyone would even recognize it; so I went with some kind of post-apocalyptic ambience. The sound of the actual laser was created in Audacity with a reverse Fourier sequence of sinusoidal waves; but I kind of regret that, as looking back I could have generated with a single line of FFmpeg on the terminal. No sense lying now, though—I used a GUI and bothered loading a lot of features I didn't need. Modern computers have spoiled me.
The final video was constructed in FFmpeg, after rendering to 1080hd PNGs. In the future, I'll likely use OpenEXRs instead, to allow for more detailed post work. (PNGs are a world better than GIFs ever were, but if possible it would be really great if everyone got used to future formats like OpenEXR, WebM/WebP, and FLAC—and if you absolutely must use MP3, for the love of god, use a variable bit rate!) File size will likely increase but it's worth it for the format capabilities. Sound was tacked on later, and since I felt the need for a visual interface to get it right I went ahead and used Kdenlive. I nearly used Blender's video editor, but Kdenlive has better (or at least more familiar) control on panning effects.
My postmortem has a few issues. The shoulder plate protrudes through the armor early on, likely because I went and modified the armature auto-weights to remove a different issue. I already mentioned the PNG thing. The glass flying from the wall could have had more speed, smashing it was an act of zombie violence, after all; but it's hard to say if noting that is going to keep me from doing it twice. It could just be a thing that I need to gather experience with; I've done breaking glass maybe once, and it was for a game that was never released. I might build a whole new project around it just to get used to that. The animation of the pieces followed an intensity distribution of a Gaussian bell curve roughly around the impact point. If I'd thought about it, I might have just written a plugin to do that with Python; in fact I might yet.
The grenade explosions look good, but the animation is at fault—at the very end, there seems to be a deprecated frame from an earlier render that still made it in, likely because I botched the frame count. In a professional project this would be an easy fix—there are only a few frames that need to be rerendered—but since this was just-for-fun and for my own experience, I didn't bother.
There are a few places where fur seems to be penetrating the armor, or growing out of it in a place that clearly shouldn't have any hair. This was relatively minor; but the kind of thing I had to render before I noticed. In the future, I'll probably render one-frame-for-every-ten in slow motion and low quality to pick these things out before I go with 1080hd or, God forbid, 4K. It was 30 ½ rendering hours on my home machine as it stands.
There were also a few volumetric effects which, looking back, slowed down the render but had little effect on the final model. As an example, believe it or not, he's standing in a thin cloud of chest-level smoke, and you are actually seeing it. The problem is, almost no one is going to notice that, and I had to do a ray march to get it in! It's so universal, I could've just added it in post.
If you don't recognize the cyberdemon or know what on earth CDDA is, there's no fault there; I was just goofing around and you'll have to take my word on it being funny. If not funny, it was, at least, an enormous amount of fun to make. XEDRA: Weaponizing Moose, for a Better Tomorrow!