I thought I would pop in and say hi, introduce myself.
I'm Lynn, I'm a VRM artist. I make rigs for vtubing and vrchat, but potentially any number of new metaverse platforms that pop up in the future. Creatively, I occupy that space just between software engineer and concept artist, where I do a little of both. I skew technical, but enjoy working with texture painting. I work a lot with Blender and Unity, but I wouldn't consider myself a game developer.
So, I've been looking for new ways to build models that aren't vroid studio. I've tried a number of things. Spent three weeks liberating sims4 characters, with mixed results. It can be done, but their rigs aren't really designed for talking. And you can get them there, but it's work. Real work. I've also tried working with Wolf3d models, and those work fairly consistently, but they have this look to them. There are really only maybe a dozen models they use. The system isn't as dynamic as I had hoped it would be with model generation. And I want to make things that are weird, and fun and unique. I've also toyed with things in the unity asset store, but I don't usually get the kind of dynamism I'm looking for from them.
This weekend, I began experimenting with Makehuman models. And it was fun, because I was able to hit varying degrees of realism fairly quickly, once I figured out how materials and geometries worked. I also figured out how to do the direct import on Blender 2.83, which mostly works. I was amazed and fascinated that blendshapes could be done this way. Once I knew what I was doing with it, the only thing I really had to go in and fix was the foot posing, which goes a little sideways when models are wearing heels. But I was able to make one that mostly looked like, and I was able to make her dance. It was fun.
The things I'm interested in looking into now are:
1. Programmatic face generation from reference photos
2. Arkit Blendsahpes
I have leads on both, which I'm following up on with all the veracity of a puppy with a new chew toy!
Anyway, I wasn't sure if this was the right place to post something like this, as I don't have any questions just yet.
But I figured I would drop it here anyway.