Character Design for Social VR Spaces
Project briefing:
The character is meant to be used as an avatar in Virtual Reality spaces, focused on the platform VRChat. That means the project needs to account for hardware limits (target hardware: Meta Quest), alongside providing animations for user expressions (primarily hand movements).
VRChat is a social app where anyone can join in a virtual space with friends or strangers, using an avatar to represent themselves. Those avatars can be animated to represent user real life movements on the platform. For that, a humanoid rig is mapped to user inputs. Most VR Headsets can track head and hand positioning, with some tracking individual finger positions.
The character presented here was made to allow one to one movement with the user, down to individual fingers.
Hello! Luna here. Part of the reason I chose to do this little project was my frustration while playing the mobile version of the VRChat platform, as most avatars were not well optimized to run on my device, so I was left watching a bunch of "fallback avatars" instead of the ones chosen by the other players. I decided to make my own optimized (and pretty) avatar as a way to create inclusive content.
Some of the difficulties of this project were figuring out how to make a decent 3D animated hand (not easy), figuring out how to make an outline, and learning all the ins and outs for Virtual Reality art.
The design chosen was a humanoid character dressing a black pijama with colorful stars, outlined by the colors of the transgender flag (blue, pink and white). The design was made to have a comfy feeling, while being supportive of trans rights.
[Warning: a bit of technical stuff ahead]
The character outline was made by duplicating the clothes mesh, displacing it by a little bit, then inverting the normals to the inside of the mesh. Backface Culling did the rest of the work.
Character model was made following the constraints of the chosen platform, having only 7026 triangles and 52 bones. Mesh, textures and animations all combined sizes only 768kb!
Character design, character modeling, texturing, rigging and animation all made by me.
There are two more Avatars created by me down bellow. A cyber bunny suit and a hyperpop chibi catperson! Both follow the guidelines I stated above for performance and tracking.
Thanks!
~Luna Xavier
