This spot was squeezed in between other spots, and ended up requiring a lot of work. Which meant I had to roll up my sleeves and work overtime. Kobe Bryant has these different animal archetypes he identifies as when he’s playing ball. Namely a leopard, a shark and a snake. In fact, he refers to himself as ‘the black mamba. He becomes the black mamba when he’s on a court. Hence the shoe logo’s twin fanged snake head shape… And black mambas wear some seriously intricate shoes when they’re ballin…

So intricate that the shoe took several of us a significant portion of our time to build, rig, and look dev… I spent hours with the shoes at my desk, studying materials, so that I could match textures and other physical qualities exactly as they were. The shoe has many different materials, a very complex build. We ended up with a shoe that had about 65 shader assignments, and over a hundred pieces. Everything was modeled. except the finest details. Even the yellow stitching was geometry.

To turn this around quickly, animation was being worked on while look dev was going on, with no solid referencing system for render setups. This means that on my end I was faced with over a hundred shader assignments per shoe (left and right) for each shot. Not only would this kill me by boring me to death, but we simply couldn’t spend the time to do this. So I scripted all the shader assignments, along with a starting light rig setup, and I handed the script to the layout/anim ninjas who helped me setup all the shots in 2 days and get them to render. What would take a couple hours of work at best was automated into 30 seconds. This was pretty key to our timeline.

Adam did another amazing job modeling this shoe, one of the most complicated things to model that I’ve worked on. And it shows. The elements we handed to comp looked really good on their own. Izik did a great concept for the spot, and in the end Nike came back for more.

Kids better be buying this 100 dollar shoe… Superfad.