Metashima

Our team designed and built the Metashima as though they were physical products. This meant the animation needed to match the physicality and mechanical design of each virtual Metashima in the most realistic way possible.

They were brought to life through high quality photorealistic animation that wouldn’t be out of place in the latest sci-fi blockbuster or animated feature. From the movement of the different robotic parts like its side pods or the front lids and the digital facial expressions to the way in which the Metashima moved through space, everything needed careful consideration and the right style of animation to support the idea of this as a physical real-world robot.

With other projects of this kind relying on static images, the animation of the Metashima is what elevated them to another level, and gave the robots life and personality. A lot of the design inspiration came from the aesthetics of Japanese Mecha or Gundam models which you can see in the Metashima’s available accessories, the tiny details of the parts that they’re made up of, and the design decals added to their structures.

What the Metashima project allowed the team to do was develop its real-time animation pipeline, refining it throughout the project as it delivered the beautifully-animated robots. The team did this to respond to a fast-growing demand for marketing content that showed off the different Metashima robots and their systems. There was also the need to design and animate scenes inside The MAG; the world which the Metashima inhabited.