The Architects is a Web3 NFT project based on the Solana Bloackchain that focuses on building spaces and experience on the Unity-powered metaverse, Portals. They came to Dummy Labs to create a base avatar that they could use as a blank slate to customize and add special traits to.
Role:
Character Artist
Industry:
NFT Collection
Duration:
4 weeks
Challenges
Avatar Base: One of the main challenges was creating a very simple yet stylized character that would be a great base to add a variety of different traits to.
Customizability: The second main challenge was making sure that the character would be able to have multiple accessories and clothing that would not intersect with each other as the user customized their characters.
My Approach
Design Phase
Modeling: As with most of the avatars I design I used Gravity Sketch to iterate on ideas for a base character and eventually settled on a very basic stylized humanoid that could be easily customized.
Texturing: The base traits were all very simple and in order to keep the memory budget as low as possible I used solid colors for each of the clothing traits
Rigging and Skinning
Rigging: For the rigging I decided to test a new program I had been using at the time called Reallusion Accurig. This program allows you to upload a T-Pose 3D model and place pivot points on each joint and it would auto-rig and skin your character for you.
Touch-up: With using an auto-rigging software there are unintended deformations that happen with certain bones so I went back in using Blender to clean up some of the weight painting.
Testing and Finalization
Portals Testing: To test the final model we uploaded the rigged .GLB character to Portals' custom avatar section. We then ran around the map and tested out different animations like emoting, jumping, etc. to ensure the character was behaving as intended.
Conclusion
This was a fun and simple project that tested how we could keep things basic to create a jumping off point for The Architects to build a library for traits to customize their avatars with.
