Process

I started work on this VR model earlier in the year as one of my inaugural Blender projects and it is turning into my best humanoid model by far.

I cannot go very far into the creation of the design as it is not my own, but instead will speak on a few limitations that have tightened up my workflow and forced me to become a much better modeler. The main one is a limit on the amount of polygons I can get away with. Going at this model the way that I have done previously would end up with a rig that would work wonderfully for animation but would be too bulk for live face-tracking and streaming. The chains in the model’s jewelry alone wouldn’t work out so I ended up making each chain link a flat image along a curve with a displacement map giving the facsimile of depth. Just that choice cut the model down by thousands of polygons. Anything that isn’t directly visible on the model isn’t there, the lace of her sleeves are just her arms with additional displacement to mimic fabric.

This project has also been worked on in nearly every software that I have on my computer, pushing me to streamline my workflow as I went from Photoshop, to Illustrator, to Blender, to Premiere, Unity, VSeeFace, and several more.

There are still several things left to do with this model both on the surface and behind the scenes. Some of the chains tend to clip into the body when they move back and forth, the facial movements are present but stiff and seeing as nearly a third of all the polygons are in the hair, I am looking into replace the solid strands of hair with hair cards (example).