Next Home, with Framestore · Furniture rigs with build scripts
Next Home
For a Next Home advert at Framestore, I rigged every moving furniture item, combining broad animation controls with precise blendshape deformations. Each asset had its own build script, so rigs could be rebuilt quickly when models changed, and light proxy models, with weights projected or wrapped onto the high-density meshes, let animators work in a real-time scene.
- Client
- Next Home
- Studio
- Framestore
- Role
- Furniture rigs with build scripts
The challenge
In this Next Home advert the furniture moves. Every moving item needed a rig that animators could drive quickly, and the models kept changing during production. Some assets were also so dense that animating them directly would have been slow.
What I did
- Furniture rigs. I rigged all the moving furniture items, with controls for animating them broadly and precise blendshape deformations and transformations for the detail.
- Build scripts. Every asset had its own build script, so when a model was updated or changed, the rig could be rebuilt quickly instead of being redone by hand.
- Proxy models. For the assets with the highest topology density I made light proxy models for the animators. The proxies' weights were projected or wrapped onto the high-density meshes they drove, so the final furniture followed the animation as closely as possible.
The outcome
The animators could work in a real-time scene, and model changes could be turned round quickly because each rig rebuilt from its script.
