 Premise Isn't it great when you talk with somebody online and you see his mouth moving while he talks? It really add ups to the experience, specially in Virtual Reality. That's what this is about. Creating different shapes so you can see yourself talking when you look at a mirror. It's the little touches that makes something good to something better. Starting Let's say you already have your model done, it's also rigged and skinned so its ready to go. But, you want to make some blend shapes because in-game they look neat and funny. Well, let's make them! First, we need to know how many blend shapes we need to make. VRChat uses 17 different blend shapes. These are:
It's important to know that these shapes that we are going to make will need to have a very specific name. For example, aa is called vrc.v_aa; ch is called vrc.v_ch; etc... The only exceptions to this rule are the first 4 of the list. Their names will be vrc.blink_left, vrc.blink_right, etc...  As you can see in the image, there is no "." in any of the names, and that's because Maya doesn't let you write dots in the names. We will roll with it for the moment. Duplicate your character and move it to a side. Hide what is not necessary and show what it is. Use an image of reference to know how to shape the mouth depending on the shape you need.   This gives you a general idea of how I made the different shapes of the mouth depending on the viseme. You can see that there is not any vrc.blink_right or vrc.lowerlid_right, but I will talk about that later. Another thing to keep in mind is that even if vrc.v_sil doesn't change the shape whatsoever, you must change something regardless. When we use Blender later, when exporting, if Blender detects that "sil" it's the same as the base form, it will remove "sil" from the blend shapes. Move a vert a little bit, one that no one will see, on the back of the mouth, for example. Now that we have every shape done, we will use the Shape Editor. Open the Shape Editor in the sculpting tab in Maya. Or going to Deform>Blend Shape.  Now, select one shape that you created and then select the original model. Go to the Shape Editor and click on "Create Blend Shape". Repeat this with all the 17 shapes.  Before, I said that I didn't have any blink_right nor lowerlid_right and that's because you dont usually need them. If the character is symmetric, you can duplicate your blink_left, select the new target and in the Shape Editor go to Shapes > Flip Target. This will create a mirror effect and making the right eye to blink. You should change the name once it's done. Export and Import We have every shape ready, so now we will export all the package. Select all the shapes, meshes and bones and go to export. Be mindful of checking in the box of Animation and making sure that Blend Shapes is activated too, because if it's not, it wont export correctly.  Write the name you want and export it. Now we will open Blender, where we will change the names of the shapes to the correct one. Open a new scene and delete the objects that get created all the time. Camera and light too. Then, import the file we made earlier. Navigate through the menus to find the Shape Keys sub-menu.  Here you can change the names of all the shapes. Delete the first "_" and replace it with a "." The last thing you have to do is to re arrange all the shapes to be in order. The order is the same as the list that I wrote at the beginning.  Once that's done, export as fbx. Upload You should have your Unity latest stable version already set up. If you don't, check this guide out made by my friend Alejandro Peño where he explain how to set it up. With the character imported, we will add a new component called VRC_Avatar Descriptor.  We will draw the mesh into the "Face Mesh" section. All the visemes should appear below there. Now just click on each section and select the corresponded viseme.  Like this.  Once it's finished, you can upload the character like you usually do. Again, if you don't know how, you can check this guide: Conclusion Blend shapes visemes are a great way to give life to your avatars in VRChat. I would 100% recommend using them in your future avatars. Depending on the model it takes around 30 min to an hour to create all the shapes needed, and they look great. It's a lot of fun making these, so give them a try! Premise Back in May Oculus quest was released, it is a standalone device that allows you to use VR without needing to use any PC or wires. Until then you needed a high end computer to run games or experiences on VR so developers and creators didn't had to reduce as much when creating content or avatars for VRChat.
 Before starting During 2018 Q4 Polygonal Mind's team made a challenge of making 100 characters in 100 days, you can check more about it here. Me and my friend Alejandro Peño joined the studio as interns and were tasked with a project where we had to prepare, optimise and upload over 100 characters to VRChat for the Oculus Quest. It was challenging workload but through consistent job, we were able to transform this characters into optimised avatars for VRChat.  Some characters have proven to be more difficult than others, so I will make sure to explain you what problems I faced when fixing non optimal characters and how I managed to solved them. Even though we used Maya in the studio, any of this knowledge is applicable to any 3D modelling software. So I'll recap a series of problem I faced when setting them for VRChat. Lets start optimizing
VRChat team provided the following rules to follow when it comes for Quest avatars:
Step 1 - Reducing Textures This might be the easiest of all steps. All the characters used 2048x2048 textures. So we had to reduce them to the desirable size. In Photoshop, we created a new project with 1024x1024 pixel resolution. And then we imported all textures. Once they were all in and adjusted to the box, we exported each layer as an independent PNG.
Since they already had the appropriated name, we had 100 textures ready to go.  Step 2 - Polycount reduction Most of the models had the right poly count, but some others didn't. Franky's head is a clear example, it had 12572 triangles.
Here are some rules we follow when it comes to reducing polygons:
... wait... What if the maps seams are non optimal? What can you do when there are map seams literally everywhere? That's what happened to the 50th character, Samuela.
We duplicated the model, and started deleting edges without thinking too much about the seams or texture, since we were going to make a new UV layout once the model is reduced.
Once in Zbrush with every mesh and the old texture imported, we took the old Samuela model, subdivided it and made the texture to be poly paint.  Beware, Zbrush applies color to the model's vertex, so you will need to subdivide your model until it reach a million of points so you can keep as much detail as possible of the texture. Time for to project the high model polypaint into the new one by subdividing the number of polys of the new to match the old one and now simply project the old Samuela to the new one. Repeat this part for every subdivision you have until you get enough texture detail on the new model.
Note that projection might not be precise and you might have to improve the texture in Photoshop. Adding mouth and eyes into an existing model for Visemes This part is completely optional. But it really gives your characters life when they are in game.
For a quick turnaround what we did was:
Rig For the rig, we used Mixamo. Mixamo is a web page that rigs and skins automatically given some variables like the position of the wrists, elbows, knees, chin and groin. For the most part, Mixamo did a pretty good job, specially for all the humanoid characters. But for the not-so-human, you had to edit the skin to have a great result. How to fix those is a topic for a different dayone . We'll talk about this deeper in a future post. Materials Like many of you reading this we firstly uploaded the characters to VRChat thinking only for PC users so all the materials were left with the Unity's default shader, but Quest avatars requires a mobile diffuse shader, so we had to change them. If you have followed a good naming convention, this will only take 1 minute. For example we add a mtl_ prefix to all our materials. In Unity type the material prefix to quickly select and change them all at once.   Conclusion 100 characters are a lot. But like I said earlier, with some structure and consistent work after 3 weeks, we made this happen. At Polygonal Mind, we use Notion.so to have all our projects and task organised. With that being said There were a bunch of characters that needed little to no optimisation, but some others that needed almost a full rework. This stuff takes time. Especially if you count them by the hundreds. I hope this guide helped you to optimise your avatar for Quest users, it was a challenging project for us, but the work pays off very quickly once you see players wearing them in game. So sit back, put on some music, and start working. It's been really fun making these and the paid-off of seeing avatars you've been working on being used by other people is a great feeling.  Post by: Pedro @05predoPedro Solans was an intern and now junior animator working at Polygonal Mind's in-house team. Daniel @toxsamDaniel García (aka Toxsam) is the founder and creative director at Polygonal Mind.
First of all, what's a LOD? LOD (Level Of Detail) is a method of game optimization that decreases the complexity of a 3d mesh (or lately even shader, textures, etc.) as it gets further away from the player, and it's usually used in conjunction with other optimization techniques like culling. The most common execution of this method consists of utilizing a secondary mesh, which replaces the original with a lower resolution one at a certain distance to avoid having too much unnecessary detail. The initial mesh can be generated automatically, but you will have to fix stuff manually!  Using MayaLT to create automatic LODs Maya has a built-in tool that lets you create automatic LODs based on either camera distance or % of the total poly count. You can access it in Edit > Hierarchy > LOD (Level of Detail) > Generate LOD Meshes. Click the box right next to this last button to get access to the options instead of the defaults.
General Workflow 1. First, duplicate the mesh we are going to LOD and hide it. This is the equivalent to duplicating the background layer and working in a regular layer in Photoshop, just to make sure we keep the original material in case something went wrong.  2. Then use the tool to create as many LODs as you need.  3. Extract the meshes from the LOD group by unparenting them to examine and fix any problems you could find, individually.  4. Apply the material of the original mesh to the LODded one, so you can see how close to the original mesh's look it is. 5. After that, follow the troubleshooting steps below to fix the problems you caught. 6. Finally, when you're happy with the result, rename everything to your chosen naming convention and export. Troubleshooting
 
Using LODs in Unity 2019 Unity has a built in LOD system. First, you need to have the correct hierarchy for it to work correctly. Import your mesh and the LODs of that mesh to the scene, create a new empty GameObject, put the original mesh and its LODs inside the empty GameObject. Then select the parent > go to the Inspector Panel > Click on Add Component > search for "LOD Group"   You'll then see 4 slots, for different LODs. You can add and delete as many as you want by right clicking over them and selecting "Insert before" or "Delete", respectively.  You can now assign a mesh you have prepared before to every LOD by clicking on the big square "Add" button by having previously clicked on the desired LOD.  Also, by dragging between the transition of the LODs from left to right, you can set up the separation of the different LODs based off the distance. By dragging the camera icon you can preview the system working as it would happen in real time when the player was getting closer or further from the mesh.  The Conclusion As it happens with any tool, if you just leave the results that got automatically generated the result is going to be a lot worse than if you tweak it a bit to fit your needs (for example, just drag and dropping Smart Materials vs actually understanding material layering and utilizing Smart Materials to accelerate your texturing process in Substance Painter or Quixel). The beauty of this is the combination of the automatic process and the human input, generating a faster mesh than doing it all manually, but getting a better result due to the fixes done by the user. Post by: Alex @VontadehAlejandro Bielsa is a junior 3D artist working at Polygonal Mind's in-house team.
Maya overview  Viewport The viewport is where the magic happens: it's the space where you visualize all the meshes and perform all the operations regarding them.
Viewport Tools
Snaps
Show and Hide Meshes
Outliner
Shelves A shelf is a quick access space to tools and premade scripts by the user.  
How to install a custom shelf on Mac Go to the directory: /Applications/Autodesk/mayaLT2019/Maya.app/Contents/scripts/shelves How to Install a custom shelf on Windows Go to the directory: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\MayaLT2018\scripts\shelves Modeling Tools
Materials To add a material to a 3D object do a RC on it and look for the material. If you wanna modify it's values you can do on the attribute editor, here you will be able to add a texture to the material. The Hypershade allows you to see all the shaders in the scene and also have even more control over them. Layer Editor
MAYA Hotkeys Transformation Tools
Selection
Extra spicy hotkeys
UVs These are used to apply textures properly to the 3D model. Here are the ways to generate UVs within maya. The most used in the studio are:
The most used tools are:
The UV editor window uses the same shortcuts as the main viewport. We hope it was helpful and you could learn something new! Feedback is welcome, if you find something we should add or change please let us know! We're very active on Twitter Post by: Daniel @toxsamDaniel García (aka Toxsam) is the founder and creative director at Polygonal Mind. Alex @VontadehAlejandro Bielsa is a junior 3D artist working at Polygonal Mind's in-house team.
The outcome We came up with a specific MayaLT workflow that could help us to reduce the amount of time we had to invest into making the characters. We ended up doing all character 36 variations in 2 weeks. Similar yet differentThe guys over We're Five Games provided references for the characters they wanted to have in the game. As you can see in the pictures there is a great range of customisation choices for your character. 
Workflow Brainstorm
At Polygonal Mind we like to gather around and start brainstorming possible workflows. Should we make them separately or together? Can we use any new tool within Maya? What about Substance Painter?
For TRDS, we decided to make a list out of everything we saw on the concept, if you check the concept's pictures you can probably see that a lot of them wear a similar polo and pants, with small variations like long sleeves, open shirts, tank tops. With this in mind, we started to look into things that are very similar and can be just done once and then create a variation via texture. To summarise, pay attention to what's similar, what's different and... list it up. At the end, we reduced the clothing models to nine different shirts and ten different pants. Instead of producing 72 clothes at once, we sorted out a lot of extra work! And made it easy to modify, add, exchange, etc.  The magic behind UVs
Having a good set of UVs per model is very important because we're going to use the same 3D model with interchangeable textures, this way we're just going to make 10 pants instead of 36. Same goes for the rest of the clothes except for the special ones.  When it comes to making perfectly interchangeable clothes with shareable UVs you can try one of these options:
Usually this depends on what kind of model you are doing, in this case, we used both methods, the first one for texturing and the second one to turn models into female versions.  Transfer Attributes from Male to FemaleOne of the things we did to reduce production time was to make a male character and then use it as a reference for the female one. As you may have noticed male and female bodies have a few differences that made impossible to fit clothes for both models; breasts, slender waist, among others...
 ConclusionTotally Reliable Delivery Service has been a great project to work on. It has allowed us learn new MayaLT techniques for character development in order to save time and work. We can't wait to see the game come out!  Post by:Laura @Lauretta_38Laura Usón is a 3D artist working at Polygonal Mind's in-house team.
The impactHaving the avatars being featured by VRChat. Unity's social media account reposting our content during the challenge. Increase of the followers both on Instagram and Twitter. Idea BackgroundIt all started back in September of 2018. I wanted to start investing time into develop new game art styles using Unity, I was not sure how to start but then I found about the 100 days drawing challenge by Amanda Oleander on her Instagram. Her challenge and commitment inspired me so much that I did my own version of it by doing 100 characters, 1 character a day for 100 consecutive days. The condition for me was to make an Instagram and Twitter post with a moving character every day, so I had to create a steady workflow that could work for all the days of the challenge. The challenge processTo succeed on a challenge like this you should try to define a process, and try to follow through it everyday, this will help you focus and will slowly reduce the time you have to dedicate to the challenge overtime, since your brain will be learning and adapting to the tasks. If you don't know how to set up a process, is okay, most of the times processes are the result of repetition, so just start, do it once, and then write down the steps you made to get to the final result, then the next day try to repeat them. Over time, the process takes shape, evolves and improves. During the 100 days a lot of people asked us how we managed to make 1 per day so we'll be taking a general overview of the character creation process. Most of the characters follow this scheme. - Conception
- Fixing retopology with MayaLT
- UVs and Textures
To create the texture, we like to use Adobe Color in the studio. Easily help us find color schemes that work for out characters. - Rigging and Animation
- Unity scene set upFinally we got to the point where I wanted invest more time at. Unity. The hole point of this madness was to force myself to use Unity as a quick tool to develop new visual concepts and ideas for future projects. Not gonna dig into every detail of what I did with Unity, but there are a couple of tools that helped me to save time and get great results during the 100 days.
- Final steps
- BONUS: extra tips to iterate faster on a challenge like this one
Uploading them to VRChat as avatarsHalfway through the challenge we came up with the idea of giving a second life to all the characters by transforming them into avatars for the Metaverse. They were all already rigged with Mixamo so we knew by experience that they could be used, at least in VRChat. Months later I decided to give it a go to the avatar idea with the help of 2 interns in the studio.  Initially we just wanted to give them simple rig and upload them into VRChat, but after a few days into the work, we got reach out by the VRChat team, they loved the variety of our characters, and they suggested us to give them some extra love, by adding visemes and optimising them for the new Oculus Quest release, this way they could be used by even more players. So we improved them and created a VRChat World to gather them. I must admit that Investing some more time into adding visemes made the characters way more interesting and fun to use! Here is a screenshot of our Notion.so board in the middle of the project.  There is a lot of documentation already about how to upload avatars into VRChat, so we wont be covering any of it on this post, but, we'll be releasing another blogpost with some tips for optimising avatars for Quest using MayaLT later on. Next Steps for this project As you can see in our roadmap for now our most closest goal is to keep uploading all the characters into VRChat with visemes, we're really close to have them all up and ready to use. At the same time we'll be improving the world too. After this our next milestone is to tokenize this avatars using the blockchain, our final goal is to release all model files for free to download on our site, as "Open source avatars" so anyone can use our avatars in any virtual world platform or project they're developing. During the time I was writing this post, the guys at LIV reached out to us to use the avatars for their platform, so you'll be able to use them for streaming Beat Saber soon. If you have a VR platform or a project you might wanna use our characters at, feel free to reach out so you can have a test before we make the open source release. Conclusion
If you want to see the characters during the challenge, you can check our Instagram and Twitter accounts.
Post by:Daniel @toxsamDaniel García (aka Toxsam) is the founder and creative director at Polygonal Mind. 
This post is about a mobile premium game we are working along with Crescent Moon Games, called Ravensword Legacy, which is currently on development.
This week I had to work revamping the awesome characters that were already made by another team member in order to allow them to talk. After some research, I found a plugin for Unity called LipSync Pro that allows you to add some keyframes for Audio Clips, so that the character that is talking moves their mouth accordingly (it allows for some other blendshapes, like blinking or yawning, and even some presetted expressions like angry and happy among others, so you can assign each expression to each line of the character).
The core of spoken languages
For this kind of work, game developers usually group the phonemes together, for example the letter "k" in "key" sounds the same as the "c" in "car", hence needing only one phoneme for that sound. Same with "m", "b", and "p" and so on.
Adapting to the new needs
I proceeded to modify the models and open their mouths, add the inside of the mouth (commonly called mouthbag), tongue and teeth. I also had to modify the textures so the teeth, tongue and mouthbag were textured.
After this, I duplicated and modified three times the resting pose for the A, E/I and O phonemes. As the game is low poly and has pixel post processing and a limited colour palette (sometimes even as low as 8 bits!), too much fidelity and/or fluidity would make it look uncanny.
Each of these heads were exported as a single head with 4 blendshapes, using the modified mouth's ones as targets for the said blendshapes.
Setup of the system
I created a LipSync info .asset file from that Audio Clip via LipSync's Clip Editor (shortcut Ctrl + Alt + A) and started adding the phonemes that matched with what the line was saying. Having only 3 phonemes really sped up this process, otherwise it'd have been too tedious. After that was done, I saved the LipSync info .asset file in the same folder as my Audio Clip.
Each of these black markers means that the mouth will change to the specified phoneme at the specified time. Once this was done, I went back to the prefab of the character head, added the LipSync script and assigned the head mesh as the main mesh, and the teeth as the secondary mesh. This means that the head blendshapes will drive the teeth ones too. I also assigned the Audio Output of this character to be the origin of the sound of the line, and dropped it into the slot.
I then specified which blendshapes were to be assigned to which phonemes so that LipSync knew what blendshape it had to change everytime the timeslider passed through a phoneme marker.
Conclusion
And so this is the end result! It was a very fun experiment and I'll probably end up using this method again in the future for personal projects.
Please be aware the audio clip was a test one to make sure the plugin worked and it's not intended to be used in the final product, since it's a dubbed line from another game.
If this was helpful to you in any way please consider sharing it with your gamedev friends, we really appreacite your support!
Post by:Alex @Vontadeh
Alejandro Bielsa is a junior 3D artist working at Polygonal Mind's in-house team.
Passionate about videogames, vivid tutorial drinker and cat lover. |
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