In March we enjoyed teaming up with London's Ground Ctrl to provide over twenty stylised rigs for GlaxoSmithKline's latest Horlicks marketing campaign. Flex Animation delivered full body and facial rigs for all hero human characters, as well as range of custom vehicle and prop rigs.
Akin, Omair, Ida and Damien fight to keep children nourished in NutriQuest
The campaign promotes the new iOS & Android platform game through a series of CG teaser trailers. The characters can also be seen posed grinning on Horlicks packaging, collectible tokens, interactive website content, social media and online marketing.
Rigged characters appear on official Horlicks beverage products and iOS/Android compatible collectibles
With the number of rigs required in such a short turnaround, we relied on our in-house rigging toolset to automate the build process. Consistency across our stylised human rigs allowed animators at Ground Ctrl to transfer animation from character to character and re-use poses and keyframe data. We also utilised our own truck rigging toolset to provide vehicles with physically correct auto rolling wheels, engine noise attributes and path controls.
For the facial rigs Ground Ctrl animators opted for ergonomic 'on-the-face' controls that would drive intuitive face shapes as they were pushed in various directions along the planes of the face. We automated any functionality requests, condensing the features of some controls for quick posing, and applying them across the board for all the assets.
Dr Greedy schemes from inside the hijacked Horlicks factory
The official trailer can be viewed here. Special thanks to Ground Ctrl London for working with us on this fun and fast paced project.