When Nikes Air Max 1 Ultra Flyknit is hitting the stores "launch" will have a whole new meaning. High up in the sky we don't loose grip or traction and celebrate the latest killer shoe of Nike in all it's lightweight glory. And Nike Sportswear | Global Brand Design is heavy on the coolness slide.

Spawning from the visual style of the central animation a whole lot of things were created to form a complete retail package. From the shops window front over engage zones, footwear walls and pedestals all the way to turning our 3d assets into real actual objects to put up in stores, the whole range is covered. And yes - of course there is highres prints so you can cover the facade of a whole building.

Before we went all ballooney on the Air Max 1 there was a whole lot of ideas and setups we tried on our search for the perfect outfit of the launch film. Equipped with complete freedom to bring the lightest layouts to light we had fun with tons of mood images. Also we warmed up our technical setup muscles and flexed a few nodes and simulations into soft squishy shapes that we could cover with knitted material only to have that torn of like rubber. I guess you wanna see that? Well here's the process reel:

A pretty established thing now in most animations that Nike produces is a majestic shot of knitting happening. To get a feel for the pattern at hand we resorted to real life knitting and reproducing the Ultra Flyknit pattern with a big thread on large scale.

This helped tremendously to reproduce the whole thing in 3d. It took two days to reverse engineer the pattern in real life and then it took even longer to re-engineer reality into splines and posemorphs and softbodies and correctional shapes.