As Altspace VR’s Senior Technical Artist, I empower our artists by developing content workflows, prototyping, creating pipelines, and performance profiling.
I led an overhaul of Altspace avatars, responsible for technical art direction, technical animation, shading, production management and project planning.
Our focus with these new avatars was to make Altspace a more diverse and expressive place. We focused our design on presence, customization, and performance. On Oculus Quest, we support an industry leading 50 avatars in one space.
AltspaceVR is a cross-platform social events app, and supports up to 50 avatars per instancce on Oculus Quest.
I worked closely with engineers to design a scalable asset system for layering and combining avatar parts, and worked with artists to establish content workflows to support these requirements.
Every accessory fits on every body shape, every haircut works with every hat, and jackets layer on top of every shirt. A slot-based, logical system allows pieces to influence each other, so dresses can override pants, or haircuts can change if a piece of clothing has a big hood that intersects with them.
To create more expressive VR avatars and make users in Altspace feel more present, I created various prototypes to prove out the art team’s ideas. I designed and built an in-game prototype for our simulated eye contact feature, which was one of our biggest new features.
I wrote telemetry-enabled Maya pipeline tools (using PyMel) which automated various repetitive content tasks like file handling and export. This toolkit saved our team of 4 artists over 150 hours of work over 3.5 months of production as we shipped over 300 avatar assets.
Altspace VR is a platform for an incredible variety of community hosted events. A huge highlight for me was when Baobab Studios held a virtual red carpet premiere for their new short Baba Yaga. Jennifer Hudson, Daisy Ridley, and animation legend Glen Keane(!!!) were at the event as Altspace avatars, and participated in a panel discussion on the production of Baba Yaga.