Petris MOVE
Motion System
A library of fully rigged character library for a faster video production
Overview
Petris is an illustration library created by our in-house illustrator team. Petris MOVE is an After effects library of Petris characters which I had created end to end.
Main goal and specific objective of this project was to come up with a motion library system which can help scale projects both internally in-house team and also externally with agencies.
One Rig. Multiple Animated Instances.
Petris MOVE enables the creation of a single animation within the 'Master' composition, while allowing for easy persona changes of the character. In this example, only one composition was animated, and the animated personas were updated according to the requirements.
Problem Statement
PhonePe is growing at a tremendous pace. Most recently we’ve launched three new apps - IndusOS, Pincode and ShareMarket app. With our small horizontal team called Design Excellence, our main problem statement was to how to scale the illustration and motion requirements across these various apps.
With increasing number of products releasing in each apps, there’s also increasing number of illustration and motion requests.
My Role
I came up with the idea of building the motion library system which we later called it Petris MOVE. I collaborated with our in-house illustrators and created a fully rigged character library with swappable features like clothes, face, hair, shoes and even additional assets like wheelchair, bike, scooters, furnitures etc…
Team Members
Jose and Deepti are our in house illustrators who crafted this Petris Library and they helped me a lot in building the motion library with the right assets and files.
Applesauce (Generic Adult)
Blueberry (Children)
Cranberry (Specially Abled)
Dragonfruit (Old aged)
Generate multiple personas in a few clicks
Illustrating multiple personas with different poses to meet specific requirements can be time-consuming. However, with Petris MOVE, we can simply illustrate one pose in the 'Master' composition and generate a variety of personas with just a few clicks.
Multiple personas for all major libraries
Similarly, Petris MOVE is not limited to just generic adult characters. I've developed it to include four different libraries, each offering the same features for a variety of character types.
Approach
The first step was to scope the full view of these illustration library assets and start categorising them. For example: I used illustrator to lay down the shirts, pants in Illustrator layers and named them appropriately.
I also had to name all the characters as it was easier to later choose by name. Tools I used to rig and making a working swappable setup was After Effects, Duik Bassel and Joysticks plugin. Illustrator I used mainly to setup the rig file with the right positions which is critical for setting up the final rig in After effects.
I created guidelines, which helps me keep on adding more assets such as more shirts, pants, characters etc… I used a character expression control rig using Duik bassel to set up the characters and have lip sync. We can control the type of expression and spell out words inside of the facial expression comp.
Challenges
Challenging part was to make sure the asset files and the AE source files work perfectly with each other. If there was a mismatch in layers then the whole rig would not function. The way to go about it was to high level organising the files in folders and making sure the critical files are well hidden.
Impact
We received substantial appreciation from internal teams, and external agencies began utilizing the library for digital marketing, performance creatives, and even brand ad films. The Petris MOVE workflow significantly increased efficiency, speeding up the animation process by at least 2x. Agencies were reported to be able to work independently after a few onboarding and walkthrough sessions of our Motion Guidelines, which I conducted.
Lessons
This project helped me realise how important it is to think in terms of design systems instead of screen by screen approach. While this library could be limiting in some use-cases, but in most scenarios where the animations are from side view and we needed to make a quick animation, this speed up our process by a lot, allowing us to focus on creativity.
Last but not the least - Petris MOVE launch music track
Music soundtrack for the Petris MOVE, which i created at my home studio. Here's a sneak peak of how i layered various instruments and came up with the Soundtrack.
