One Rig, Many Costumes: Why vFlects Was Built as a System, Not a Drop

vFlects are the 3D-animated robots at the centre of Virtua, the metaverse platform we built in house. Since 2019 the line has sold 42,000 units. Every new Virtua account starts with one for free, and the same robot has been sold as limited editions and has carried partner collections from Hashmasks and Bored Ape Yacht Club.

That range — free default, scarce collectible, licensed partner piece — came from one early decision. This is about that decision.

Two jobs that pull apart

An avatar handed to every new account has to be cheap to produce at volume and light enough to render on whatever device someone signs up from. A collectible has to be distinct enough to be worth owning, and to hold value on a resale market.

Partner editions add a third demand: a Hashmask has to read as a Hashmask, and a Bored Ape as that ape, while still moving exactly like every other robot on the platform. Normally these are three different products, built three different ways.

Hold the robot constant

We made them one product. The robot never changes: the same skeleton, the same set of animations, the same 360-degree turntable presentation. Everything that varies, varies in what the robot wears.

That single constraint changes the cost of everything after it. A new edition becomes an art job, not an engineering job. Nothing has to be re-rigged, re-animated, or re-tested for how it moves, and the free avatar and the most expensive collectible are the same object underneath.

Three costumes, one robot

The idea is easiest to see in the models themselves. Three shipped editions sit on our Sketchfab account: an ice edition, with crystal growing out of the robot; a biker edition, in a leather vest and headscarf; and a pixel edition, wearing a voxel cap. Underneath all three is the same robot.

On top of it, they could hardly be more different. The ice edition carries 46,392 triangles and two materials. The biker edition carries 21,459 triangles and five materials. The pixel edition carries 16,469 triangles and ten materials. Nearly three times the geometry separates the heaviest from the lightest, and five times the materials separates them the other way.

That spread is the point. Each costume spends its budget where its look lives. Crystal is shape, so the ice edition spends on geometry and needs almost nothing from its materials. Pixel art is colour in hard-edged blocks, so the pixel edition keeps its geometry low and spends on materials instead. The biker sits between them. None of that freedom touches the skeleton, so none of it touches the animation, and all three move identically.

It also shows where the budget is fixed. All three stay under 50,000 triangles, so a costume can be as elaborate as its idea demands without any edition becoming the one that will not render on a phone.

What it made possible

Partner collections as costumes, not rebuilds. In April 2021, 73 Hashmasks editions were released, each vFlect paired with the Hashmask it visually wears. The drop sold out in under five minutes, the fastest sale on the marketplace at the time, and proceeds flowed back to Hashmask owners as a rolling royalty. In November 2021, five limited Bored Ape editions followed at 0.08 ETH each, modelling each ape's features and personality on the robot rather than converting flat artwork into a new 3D character.

Licensed editions on the same rig. Officially licensed editions with outside rights-holders were produced alongside the original models, without a separate pipeline for each brand.

A free tier that costs almost nothing to extend. Every new account receives a non-NFT vFlect as its avatar. Because free and paid sit on one rig, improvements to one reach the other.

Somewhere to stand. In vSpaces, the personal rooms we built for collectors who own no land, a collected piece is laid out as a model at its own scale rather than shown as a thumbnail in a grid. A collectible you can walk around is worth more to its owner than one you can only scroll past, and a consistent robot makes a room of them read as a collection rather than a pile.

A character strong enough to carry a game. The robots went on to headline their own title, vFlects: Battle for Virtua Prime, a squad strategy game in Unreal Engine, announced in November 2022 and made with Stainless Games.

The trade-off

A fixed rig is not free. Every costume has to fit the robot's proportions, which means a partner character with a very different body cannot simply arrive as itself. The Bored Ape editions show the cost and the answer together: the ape did not get its own skeleton. Its features and personality were modelled onto the robot, so the result is an ape-flavoured vFlect, not an ape.

For a line like this, that is the right way round. The thing a holder recognises across every edition is the robot, and the robot is what gives a partner edition its value on this platform. But it rules out some ideas entirely. A creature with four legs or wings is not a costume; it is a new character, with a new rig and a new set of animations, and it should be scoped and priced as one.

The other cost is that the decision is hard to reverse. Once thousands of editions share a skeleton, changing that skeleton means touching every one of them. That is the strongest argument for getting it right before the first edition ships, not after the thousandth.

What we'd tell anyone building avatars today

• Decide what stays fixed before you decide what varies. The skeleton and the animation set are the expensive part; lock them first, and variety is cheap.
• Price partnerships as costumes. If every new collaboration means a rebuild, the tenth costs as much as the first. If it is a costume, the tenth is the cheapest one you will ever make.
• Let free and paid share an object. Building the giveaway and the collectible on one rig means neither one falls behind the other.

See it for yourself

Three vFlects from the line are on our homepage. Load one and drag to orbit it — that is the shipped rig turning, not a render of it.

Sources: Virtua's wiki; BlockchainGamer.biz; CryptoSlate; Crypto Briefing; Cryptonomist.