Tristan Goodes - 3D Artist - 3D Design Director - 3D Production Manager
NIKE / RTFKT - ANIMUS
NIKE / RTFKT | Go Back
What is Animus?
Animus expands the CloneX universe, a project RTFKT developed in collaboration with the famous artist Takashi Murakami. While CloneX focused on human-like avatars, Animus introduces a diverse range of non-human, animal-inspired characters which hatch from an Animus Eggs.
These Animus Eggs represent the introduction of new species within the RTFKT ecosystem. Each Animus Egg eventually hatches into a unique digital companion with varying traits and characteristics. The project emphasizes collectibility, customization, and the use of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to create verifiable ownership of each asset.
What Was My Role?
The art assets were created by an external vendor led by Thomas Pham. My responsibility was to take those assets, ingest them, and build a system that would allow us to efficiently rig, pose, light, and render 20,000 unique characters.
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When the founders introduced the concept of Animus, I knew we were up against significant challenges. The first priority was identifying those challenges and finding solutions. Since the project involved thousands of assets, we started by establishing strict naming conventions. Before any artwork was produced, including the work from Thomas' team, we developed a flexible naming system that could scale across every Animus species without restricting design possibilities. This applied not only to asset names but also to texture naming.
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With these conventions in place, we built tools that automatically transferred textures from our ingested deliveries into the appropriate folders for each asset. Additionally, we created auto-shading scripts to streamline the rendering and publishing processes for models and rigs, covering all Animus elements and their texture variations.
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One of our biggest challenges was determining how to rig such a massive number of characters, each with unique skeletal structures and animation needs. Unlike CloneX, where avatars follow a more consistent structure, every Animus species is different. Within each species, some characters have wings, others have floating head elements, tails, multiple arms, or tentacles. To solve this, we developed a robust rigging system that allowed us to assemble characters based on their specific traits.
Rigging.
Rigging characters for Animus posed a unique challenge, as we had to produce 20,000 fully animatable characters while accommodating countless combinations of body types, accessories, and texture variations. Some characters had nearly 300 combinable elements, all of which needed to function cohesively when assembled. To tackle this, we brought in Marc English, a highly skilled rigging artist with extensive experience in the film and television industries. Marc had developed rigging pipelines and built production tools for major studios, making him an ideal fit for the complexity of this project.
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Given the sheer volume and variety of characters, individually rigging each assembled character was not feasible. Instead, we devised a system where each character component—such as arms, tails, and accessories—was rigged and skinned independently and designed to seamlessly connect to the character's core body. This "Voltron-like" approach allowed for rigs within rigs, where individual pieces could attach to a base rig using a custom socket system. We completely reengineered traditional rigging elements, such as FK/IK leg setups and inverse foot controls, to fit within this modular framework. Furthermore, the system was built without relying on Maya-specific plugins, ensuring maximum compatibility with other 3D platforms like Blender and Unreal Engine.
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To handle the 6,000 components and 20,000 unique character rigs required for the Animus launch, we automated as much of the process as possible. One of our key automation tools took each character's metadata, assembled the correct combination of components, rendered the finished character, and exported the rig for use in other applications. This solution ensured that we could deliver the massive volume of characters on time, with the flexibility to be used across multiple platforms.
QC, Lighting and Rendering
Once the assets were rigged, we developed "Hero Rigs"—comprehensive versions of each rig that included every possible variation of traits, controllers, and joints for a specific Animus species. These hero rigs functioned as master templates, allowing us to pose, light, and review the entire collection of characters. At this stage, we thoroughly checked shaders, textures, and the overall visual quality of the models. We also conducted detailed visual inspections to identify and resolve any geometry collision issues. This process formed the core of our second round of quality control (QC), ensuring that every possible character configuration was polished and production-ready before the final release.
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The hero rig approach was essential given the massive volume of characters, and it allowed us to streamline QC by evaluating the full range of variations in one rig rather than individually testing every possible combination.
