The Parallel Trading Card Game features physical cards, each depicting iconic characters and scenes from the Parallel universe. For the AR experience, the most iconic card subjects were brought to life as real-time 3D assets — visible through iOS and Android native AR by pointing a phone at the physical card. I owned the entire pipeline from initial 3D concept to final AR integration.

Each asset started as a cleaned-up 3D concept, which I then prepared for outsource production — defining shader configurations per asset type, creating detailed briefs, and establishing visual and technical benchmarks. Throughout the outsource process I reviewed all work to ensure art direction fidelity and technical compliance before final integration.

Final integration involved material setup, animation, and effects — all within the significant constraints of early native AR libraries on iOS and Android, which at the time had limited support for transparency, animation systems, and real-time effects.

The constraints of native AR libraries at the time required creative problem-solving across several areas:

Transparency & fading — Standard alpha transparency was unreliable in early AR runtimes. We implemented vertex colour alpha channels to handle fade effects and transparency zones directly on the mesh geometry, bypassing the shader pipeline limitations.

Animation — Bone-based skeletal animation wasn't reliably supported. Animations were created using alembic mesh sequences combined with Blender Geometry Nodes, delivering complex motion without a skeleton rig.

Reflections & surface effects — Real-time reflection captures weren't available in the AR context. We baked plausible reflection data directly into albedo channels to simulate metallic and gloss surface behaviour convincingly in-world.