ADIDAS tennis product line – animations

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ADIDAS tennis product line – animations

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Motion without movement

For an in-house presentation of a new line of tennis clothing, my client provided extraordinary assets: the 3d-scans of the tennis stars Alexander Zverev and Garbiñe Muguruza. We outfitted the models with products from the new clothing line and staged an animated presentation in iconic venues.

As great as it was to be able to work with the scanned models of the sport stars, we now faced a problem: they were already scanned in a “in action – pose“, to actual rig the model would have been very complicated and was in no way included in the budget. We decided to only use very slow and small movements with all the characters to make it look like a camera flight through an otherwise frozen scene and thus were able to tell a little story without the need for fully animated characters.

Improving game-ready assets

My client already had purchased 3d models of the famous Wimbledon stadium as well as US Open. Seeing that these assets were optimized for real-time applications like games, I invested quite some time into raising the amount of detail in the geometry, textures and shaders to increase realism when rendering.

The original version of these animations also contained a number of tracked typo animations and other visual effects, which for legal reasons unfortunately had to be removed for this online version.

Filling the ranks

But how should we get thousands of enthusiastic tennis fans into the stadium without blowing the budget or the time frame?

Ultimately, we decided on giving Adobe Mixamo a try, a freely accessible online character generator. You can choose different base characters and what they are wearing in a TheSims kind of way and even assign short motion captured animation clips to them. I created roughly 80 different characters – some static, some animated – and exported them as FBX-files including key frame animation curves and the necessary textures. Absolutely sufficient, regarding the high depth of field and the background character of the assets!