Inflatable Bicycle Helmet Deployment optimized for Realtime Applications

Blender, Python, Substance Painter, Meta Spark Studio • solo project • 2 weeks

During an internship at OutHere (now South North Studios) I was challenged to model and simulate the deployment of an inflatable bicycle helmet in the style of a Hövding, optimized for use in real-time graphics on mobile platforms, preferably as an Instagram filter.

Creating the low-poly model and simulation was fairly simple, the real problem was how to achieve functionality in SparkAR, where there's minimal support for blendshapes and none for alembic, all while staying below Instagrams 4MB package size limit.

My solution was to turn the simulation into a bone-driven animation using Python scripting in Blender, essentially creating a bone for each vertex in the mesh and baking the simulation the resulting bones. With some additional tweaking of export settings in Blender, this produced an animation that turned out to be functional and sufficiently small in size when imported to SparkAR.