Case study
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One rig, many costumes — the 3D avatar system that served both a free default and a scarce collectible line.
- Client
- Big Immersive — own IP
- Year
- 2019
- Discipline
- 3D avatars · Generative systems
- Live
- virtua.com
Context
An avatar that has to be two contradictory things at once. It is the free default handed to every new account, so it must be cheap to produce at volume and light enough to render anywhere in the world. It is also a scarce collectible with rarity tiers and a resale market, so each edition has to be distinct enough to be worth owning. Partner collections then had to appear as these avatars while staying recognisably themselves.
Constraints
Volume and scarcity pull in opposite directions. Producing each collectible as a bespoke character makes the economics impossible past the first few dozen; producing them as recolours makes them worthless. The animation and presentation also had to be identical across every edition, because a collectible that moves differently from the free avatar reads as a different product rather than a rarer one.
Architecture
One rig, many costumes. The robot is the constant — the same skeleton, the same animation set, the same 360-degree turntable presentation — and partner identity is worn rather than rebuilt. That is the whole system: a partner edition pairs the rig with the IP it is visually wearing, rather than converting flat artwork into a new 3D character. Holding the rig fixed is what turns each new edition into an art job instead of an engineering job.
01
Treat the rig as the constant and identity as the variable.
It is the only structure in which the free tier and the collectible tier can be the same object underneath. Every edition inherits the animation set for free, and the marginal cost of an edition drops to the artwork alone.
What it cost
Anything that cannot be expressed as a costume on that skeleton cannot be an edition, which rules out silhouette changes and non-humanoid partners.
02
Ship the free avatar as a non-collectible instance of the same system.
Every new account starts with the product rather than an advertisement for it. Familiarity with the object is what makes the scarce version legible as scarce.
What it cost
The free tier carries the same production and rendering cost as the paid one, at far greater volume.
- Rigs behind the whole line
- 1
- counted in source
The line was introduced in 2019 and went on to sell 42,000 units, absorb officially licensed partner editions on the same rig, and headline its own squad strategy game in Unreal Engine. It remains the studio's most reused piece of 3D IP.
Stack
Unity · Unreal Engine · 3D rigging · Animation systems · Generative art