Behind the Best Virtual Style Content
Creative director Blue Hamel and technical artist Francis Maslin-Ross take us behind the scenes of their sleek and sumptuous virtual style content pieces.
When you put digital clothes on a virtual avatar, you run into a familiar problem.
“It’s like in real life,” technical artist Francis Maslin-Ross said. “If the clothes don’t fit you they don’t fit you.”
Maslin-Ross and Blue Hamel, who together have been creating some of the most lavish and slick virtual style content this summer and fall for Adidas and for their own studio, ran into this problem.
“We had this really cool puffer jacket we wanted to use with a cool track suit and it jsut didn’t fit Blue’s avatar,” Maslin-Ross said. “It’s like Blue’s avatar is a size L and the jacket was a size XS.”
“It’s honestly the toughest part,” said Hamel. “The most irritating part is trying to put the garment on.”
But the two eventually got the garments to work, in the process creating a series of gorgeous and futuristic shoots featuring Hamel’s avatar in iridescent floating streetwear.
Perhaps being so far away - in New Zealand, during a global lockdown, no less - has had something to do with the recent burst in creative activity.
“Here in New Zealand, in APAC, I’m a brand ambassador for Adidas, so basically they get Francis and I to come on board and do campaigns and source product,” Hamel said. “Francis and I have been working together as a studio. He’s very good at the modeling side of things and putting together scenes.”
Those scenes, as Hamel calls them, have increasingly played with the blurring lines between the virtual world and the real world as the pandemic has forced us to live more of our lives online. But the actual inspiration was Adidas’ 4D shoe.
“The idea for these 4D videos is reality equalling virtual, our whole idea around the sneaker is how the game world and the real world are all combining together now,” Hamel said. “The shoe itself has two parts, the top part and the 4D sole, so that was kind of where that futuristic dual concept is coming in.”
“We tried photogrammetry scanning the sneaker, but it wan’t really working that well, in terms of getting the real textures and getting looking really realistic,” Hamel said. “So we turned to KACIMI Latamène to help us with the 3D modeling of the sneaker, and then Francis assembled it onto my avatar and we put it into the scene.”
The duality 4D sneaker inspired another two-sided scene: an above-as-below water world.
“I really like the trick of the camera tracking up,” Hamel said.
That led the team to create this water world you see below, with Hamel lounging on a giant bubble, floating above water.
This summer, as the pair explored aquatic scenes and game-inspired scenes, they created their most fantastic, dreamlike world by combining the two: an epic sweeping camera floating over a Christlike avatar in a pair of NASA-worthy track pants and a jetpack-inspired jacket.
“I love taking the viewer to a different world, somewhere outside their comfort zone, and that’s why I love working in 3D because you can actually create those worlds and take somewhere there,” Hamel said.
The pair borrowed the jacket but added the neon lights.
“We’ve got a set of clothing, but it’s like in real life, if the clothing doesn’t move on someone that won’t work,” Maslin-Ross said. “So we brought the clothing onto Blue’s avatar and I kinda made that all fit.”
“I created the scene and the camera angles. We divide and conquer depending on what we want to do,” Hamel said.
“I came with a technical edge to this project. There are a lot of small things that go into building something in 3D. You have to make everything work the way you want it to, things like the posing of the avatar, getting the animations onto the rigged 3D model skeleton of Blue. It’s hard!” Maslin-Ross said.
When they’re not creating pieces like this striking glassy puffer, they’re pushing themselves to perfect the craft of virtual style content. Can the clothes move, like paper in the wind?
“Clothing is always quite challenging,” Maslin-Ross explains. “They’re really thin geometry, so the actual 3D modeling, but I’m becoming more confident with things like wind simulations.”