It’s becoming a tradition for Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg to take the VES Award for Best Visual Effects in a Student Project: when Rugbybugs won on Wednesday, it became the school’s fifth award in a row.

And justly so: created by a team of five, the short, which will be used as the trailer for this year’s FMX festival, includes some very nice CG creatures, mainly of the creepy-crawly variety.

According to co-director Carl Schröter, the characters were sculpted in ZBrush and textured in Mudbox, then animated in Maya, with 3ds Max for particle effects. The short was rendered in V-Ray and composited in Nuke.

Watch previous award-winners
Below, we’ve rounded up the Filmakademie’s four previous award-winners, including another FMX ident, a.maize – and Loom, another one to avoid if you have a fear of creatures with more than four legs.

You can read the list of other VES Award-winners – mainly Gravity, Frozen and Game of Thrones – on the Visual Effects Society website, and check out our round-up of the nominees in the short-form categories here.

Watch the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg’s past four VES Award-winning shorts:

2013: Natalis
Daniel Brkovic, David Kirchner, Jan-Marcel Kuehn, Tom Ferstl

2012: a.maize
Roman Kaelin, Falko Paeper, Florian Wittmann

2011: Loom
Regina Welker, Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck, Csaba Letay

2010: They Will Come To Town
Thilo Ewers

Tags: 2014, animation, Award, Carl Schröter, Emanuel Fuchs, Fabian Fricke, Filmakademie, Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, fmx, Germany, ident, making of, Martin Lapp, Matthias Bäuerle, Rugbybugs, short, student, VES, Visual Effects Society, winners