To make the animals as realistic as possible we worked alongside zoologists to ensure the fine details of each animal were recreated to the highest level, with the intricate details of each of the six animals looks and movements capture specifically to show the breeds at the forefront of the cause.

The process of rigging each animal was a fine balance between having rigs advanced enough to create natural-looking animations yet having them export and run smoothly within a mobile AR app.

We hand created some animals and customised others from purchased models. This required a lot more work than anticipated, having to reverse-engineer and remove unnecessary data to ensure the models could export into Unity as a readable files.

In particular the lion presented many challenges - features such as displacement map morphing, blend corrections and mesh smoothing had to be stripped out, before duplicating the complex skeletal structure and having the new export-friendly rig constrained to the original.

To export models successfully we took our simplified rigs and baked all transformations into each individual bone, ensuring any remaining unsupported rigging systems were removed and we were left with a clean, Unity-ready model.

Where some controls had to be sacrificed, we used blendshapes to add finer movements to areas such as a cheetah’s gums rolling past teeth whilst yawning, a lion’s stomach tucking upwards as it roars, and a rhino’s nostrils expanding and contracting whilst it grazes.

After the success of the first release we updated the app with an endangered hummingbird collection and made it into a dual language version for the Chinese speaking markets.

Internet of Elephants Gautam Shah:

- “These are simply the best examples of AR wildlife available today, and that is because of the unique collaboration between Chantecaille, Internet of Elephants, and RamJam, which combined commitment to wildlife conservation, meticulous attention to detail, and superior modelling and game development skills.”