Your Avatar. Your Business.

Yesterday I was flying around the Playa domain, when I encountered a first time user trying HiFi on a Vive Pre. He said, “This is awesome! But why do you have only a couple of avatars to choose from?” My reply, “because your avatar is none of our business.” Figuratively and literally. That might sound short-sighted at first, but we have very deliberately decided to not create a default set of avatars for users to choose from.

When you install an Apache web server, it does not come with web-pages ready made. The important and human work of creating content, be it a website or an avatars, should be left to the content creators, who have proven again and again that they are able to create, sell and thrive on the fruit of their labor. We want to see you enjoying the creative and entrepreneurial process, and in the spirit of free enterprise, bring ever-evolving content. Content that is yours to make, host, sell, and share. It’s your VR birthright! 

Alpha user, Menithal, created and hosts his wonderful fox avatar himself. His Vive controller arrived recently, and you can see that pure joy in his body language in-world.

We’re already seeing creative and technical ingenuity come forward as our users bring their own avatars to High Fidelity. To test our pipeline, demonstrate what is possible, and get you going, we’ve provided a handful of example avatars which we made using a couple of different techniques. If you check our examples page, you’ll see a few. But keep in mind, these are examples — we expect to see folks like you create the diverse assortment of avatars that will bring life to your worlds.

 

Female and male photo-real avatars produced by BlueVishnu in an embrace, experienced by two users with Vive HMD and hand controllers. These avatars are available on our examples page.

The realistic male and female example avatars were created by Alexx Henry’sLos Angeles firm, BlueVishnu, using human models which they instantly captured using their xxArray scanning technology. Their scans are incredibly detailed and beautiful, and when coupled with new rendering technologies like PBR and subsurface scattering, they come to glowing, believable life. We hope to see companies like BlueVishnu become part of a thriving business ecosystem dedicated to creating and selling avatar content to the VR community.

The Art3mis example avatar uses a more traditional, cartoon style. The avatar was modeled in ZBrush and projected upon a Mixamo Fuse base mesh.

While BlueVishnu demonstrates what is possible in the realm of photo-realism, we have also provided a couple of examples on the opposite side of the spectrum, we’ve created a couple of more conventional cartoon-like 3D characters. These characters show what’s possible if you wish to quickly iterate using tools like Blender, Zbrush, Maya LT or Mixamo Fuse.

The luminous Being of Light example avatar was created use a Zbrush and Fuse pipeline.

These are just a couple of the approaches you can take. If you’d like to create your own avatar, we have plenty of information on the specifications and process in our documentation. If you’re interested in getting a custom avatar body-scan, contact Alexx at BlueVishnu! And if you’re a content creator, perhaps you already have a business creating and selling 3D character models or avatars on other virtual world platforms. Whatever the case, we invite you to bring your work to the emerging new content market for users of the High Fidelity VR platform. We’re happy to help you get going!