RTFKT is a creative studio known for(among other things) their CloneX NFT collection.
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When launching Animus, the next phase of CloneX, they turned to Hypothetic, where I was serving as the Creative Technical Director. They had designed 40 characters each with hundreds of parts. These parts needed to be combine to make 20,000 unique NFTs. RTFKT wanted to be able to control how rare each part was in the collection while ensuring that incompatible parts never appear together all while guaranteeing there were no duplicate characters

In Houdini I built a suite of HDAs that ingested each part from the RTFKT pipeline with a rig and PBR textures, it then converted the part description into point data. Now that a character could be expressed with a single point, thousands of characters could be generated in parallel while controlling the likelihood that each part would appear. Rules could then be applied to these points so undesirable combinations of parts would be deleted. At any stage a duplicate culling node could be used to ensure no part combination appeared more than one time.

In the end the parts could be loaded based on a cache of point data and a character could be rendered in Redshift or exported as a GLB.

We used the Houdini system to create the first characters and were able to use it as a prototype for a web based app that eventually allowed RTFKT generate characters themselves.

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