Bratz Scorchin'

Pipeline Automation & Game-Ready Asset Creation

Click & See Me Live in WebAR!

Low Poly Asset Creation

Polygon Budget Management: Performed high-to-low poly retopology / low poly asset creation. Reducing the asset from millions of polygons to 15k polys for the character body and 10k for the outfit. Modeling double-sided geometry for hair and clothing edges to solve a common AR engine limitation (no double-sided face), and bundled everything onto a single 1K PNG texture atlas.

PBR Texture Baking: Engineered a standardized Baking Pipeline in Substance Painter for Normal, Ambient Occlusion, and Metallic maps by utilizing consistent UV texel density across 1,000+ variants.

glTF/glb Delivery: Developed a custom export strategy using Python automation to deliver production-ready .glb files. Successfully keeping the average file size around 6MB to guarantee instant loading and seamless interaction within web-based and AR viewers.

Procedural Outfit Generation Pipeline

Designed and built a modular asset system in Blender that generates 1,024 unique outfit combinations across four base characters. This involved:

System Setup: Establishing a nested collection hierarchy within Blender (e.g., Body, Sunglasses, Top, Bottom, Shoes) with subfolders defining each character's traits.

Automation Scripting: Developing a Python script that programmatically controls object and collection visibility. The script was capable of identifying main trait categories and recursively setting render and viewport visibility based on specified combination data (DNA) to export all unique assets.

Enhanced the Python script with robust export functionality, allowing for the batch generation of DNA list, GLB, USDZ, and PNG renders.

The tool offers highly flexible export controls, including the entire collection, specific characters, or a custom range, significantly improving QA efficiency by enabling targeted asset touch-ups.

Impact: Saved an estimated 160 hours of manual asset assembly and setup time.

Rigging and Animation Workflow

Established an animation pipeline where all characters utilized a unified animation pack.

Workflow Design: Designed a centralized animation and rigging system utilizing a shared control rig master file across all characters. For export, bake all animations, clean up all the constraints and controllers, and save as a separate, optimized export file. This workflow ensures that the source animation data remains editable and easily fixable for future pack updates.

Technical Challenge

Successfully addressed complex technical challenges in character setup, including weight painting the lower body to ensure consistent performance across all shared animations within the pack while eliminating common visual clipping issues between the top and bottom outfit geometry in the waist area.