Nike DN8 x Nico Williams
Nike’s DN8 collaboration with Spanish footballer Nico Williams brought together movement, technology, and design in a visually striking campaign. This capsule marries the DN8’s full-length Dynamic Air innovation with Nico Williams’ kinetic energy.
On this project I worked on the Technical Direction side — specifically building a tool called deBloat_alembic, which strips and optimizes Alembic geometry based on Unreal’s requirements, streamlining the import into Marvelous Designer or clothing sims and tightening up asset workflows.
Nike Website Snapshot
Process
Once the motion capture data had been applied to the character models by the rigging artist, the files came to me for cleanup and optimization. The Alembic caches were large and cluttered with unnecessary information that made them slow to handle in downstream applications.
To streamline this, I built a custom Houdini tool called deBloat_alembic — designed to automatically remove redundant attributes, rebuild normals, and output a clean, optimized sequence ready for Marvelous Designer and Unreal Engine.
The result was a lighter, more efficient geometry pass that maintained motion accuracy while dramatically improving performance and handoff between departments.
Key features include:
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Attribute Filtering: Automatically removes unused or redundant point, vertex, primitive, and detail attributes, including UVs and normals when not required.
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Normals Rebuild: Option to recalculate normals for consistent shading after geometry reduction.
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Poly Reduction: Adjustable “Percent to Keep” slider to reduce polygon density while preserving overall form and silhouette.
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Material Group Creation: Generates organized material groups for easier lookdev setup inside Unreal Engine or Marvelous Designer.
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Compact Output: Produces lightweight, simulation-ready geometry sequences optimized for import and playback performance.
This balance between automation and control allowed artists to work with significantly lighter files without losing key deformation data or surface accuracy.
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