How to Create Avatars for Virtual Worlds -- An Oculus/Linden Lab Vet's Advice

Avatar pic by Ella Pinellapin

Continuing his blog series on what he's learned as a lead developer/consultant at Oculus, Eve Online, and of course Linden Lab, Jim "Babbage" Purbrick has a new post on the importance of avatar customization tools in open-ended virtual worlds:

If you are building a Metaverse which connects every possible virtual world how do you start? How do you please the person who wants to have the perfect tall dark stranger avatar rendered in 3D as well as everyone else? This was the challenge facing Linden Lab when building the avatars for Second Life at the turn of the millennium. While the default avatars could be manipulated into a huge variety of shapes and sizes using the available parameters, the results were often crude and the available wardrobe never strayed far from geeky teen hangout chic. Luckily for Linden Lab the inability of the avatar system to satisfy every whim was a huge opportunity for the entrepreneurs of Second Life.

Builders quickly realized that they could fashion shoes, hair, clothes and accessories from primitive 3D objects which could be attached to avatars to dramatically increase the gamut of styles that could be realised. Linden Lab enabled another wave of innovation by allowing animations to be uploaded which as well as allowing every conceivable dance move to fill the nightclubs of Second Life also enabled tiny avatars which either folded up the default avatar geometry inside cutely sculpted animal models or moved the default avatar under the floor so it was completely hidden and just served as a platform for a tiny replacement avatar standing on its head. Many years later Linden Lab finally allowed people to entirely replace the default geometry and textures so now it is common for not a single triangle or texel in a Second Life avatar to have been defined by Linden Lab.

But If a new virtual world is just launching, what avatar options should be available for early adopters? Jim's advice:

"In my opinion developers should make sure they provide realistic body shapes (not 2 meter tall avatars with impossibly large breasts) and diverse skin tones and facial features so that every potential user can easily build an avatar that looks like them if they choose. Some basic clothes should be provided, but these can be largely left to the community to develop."

Adding non-human avatar options open up some additional, interesting concerns. As Jim puts it:

"Non-humanoid avatars are technology dependent: it's easy to describe yourself as a dragon in a [test-based] MOO, harder to animate a dragon in SL and almost impossible to drive a 6 limbed dragon in VR when you have 2 tracked hands and a tracked head.

"I've had several amazing conversations with [influential game designer/Journey producer] Robin Hunicke about this: as technology improves your ability to be someone or something different in a virtual world is lessened. Once you get to tracked VR it's like you're wearing a dragon Halloween costume. The infinite potential of the virtual world is constrained by the limitations of the real world."

In other words,  as graphics and animation quality improves, there's less left to the imagination.

"VR tracking technology also has a big impact. It was incredibly exciting when people using the Oculus Toybox could recognise each other by movement alone, but also limited the traditional power of virtual worlds to allow you to take on a new identity and be someone else. Even if your avatar looked completely different your movements could give you away."

My own advice: While you should definitely encourage users to customize their avatars, you also want to impose optimization restrictions so avatars don't become a bloated lag-inducing disaster like they have in SL.

Much more on Babbage's bloody blog.

Comments

[Alicia]

I've said this before, and will continue to say this until people get the message. SL was never meant to handle mesh. Cory (yes Wagner, I finally remembered lol), tried to tell Phillip (when he was still CEO of LL) this god only knows how many times, and was either let go or he left. LL never gave a damn about how this would affect low end users. They only thought, "Hey, let's make the game prettier by allowing mesh." Roughly ten years later, and SL is a lagging mess because of every ounce of poorly optimized mesh creators have put into the game since LL allowed it.

Look at current games such as FFXIV-ARR, Fortnite, Overwatch and you'll notice that they're all 100% mesh and very optimized. World of Warcraft only began to put in mesh in tiny amounts during Warlords of Draenor (see the Paladin Tier 17 Set: Battlegear of Guiding Light and look at the belt: https://www.wowhead.com/transmog-set=1889/battlegear-of-guiding-light-normal-recolor). They continued that trend with Legion (look on https://www.wowhead.com/ and search for Tier 19/20/21 sets) and Battle for Azeroth (7th Legionaire's Armor being the example I chose for BfA: https://www.wowhead.com/dressing-room#amzm0zJ89ccoc0R9m8UeL8zxN8Ueu8zxN8Ugp808Ueg8zxN87mUei8zxG8Uen8zxN8Uel8zxN8UeA8zxN8UeE8zxN87R). While SL has had mesh for a decade, it's only proven quite the opposite as it's that very mesh in SL (clothing, shoes, etc.) that's been extremely problematic due to how severely unoptimized it is, and has caused severe lag issues as the engine itself (again... a custom, reverse-engineered one with Havok middleware). I get it, people want SL to be more modern, however... therein is the problem itself. SL can't be modernized, and that is a topic that's meant for its own article.

As for the remainder of this article by Babbage, again, he's right. However, this sentence, "In other words, as graphics and animation quality improves, there's less left to the imagination." is the only part of it I disagree on. Imagination is left to the beholder and the only limit to that is the person itself.

[Pulsar]

Alicia, the problem isn't "mesh". Every 3D model in modern games is a mesh object, even the old classic avatar in SL is a mesh object (enable the wireframe mode and see it yourself). What you call "mesh" in SL is to distinguish it from the previous clothing that was essentially texture layers and the "prims" system, then the previous "sculpties" (a clever workaround were you use a texture to store the object data, but quite inefficient and slow to load).

A concern with importing mesh objects was rather that it allowed ripping game content too easily. Also it essentially killed the fun with prims and emptied the sandboxes, as in order to create competitive content, now you need a third party 3D modeling software as Blender.

The problem with the "laggy" content, instead, isn't mesh objects (a proper made and textured mesh object is quick to load and it isn't heavy to render), but the lack of restrictions/incentives.
You can't compare games where the 3D models are made by professionals and stuff made by random users in SL. Not because you can't make proper items for SL, but because professionals would be fired if they made that messy stuff that you see in SL. That stuff is made by SL users (even popular ones) who have no idea or have the wrong one, or don't care at all about optimization.

Heck, most "creators" in SL don't even care to set the proper alpha mode for your clothes (so your clothes look funny and transparent under your hair), they don't care to set an attachment point (so you wear shoes and you get stripped off your dress. And if you use "add" instead, having a bunch of item attached to the same point becomes an issue at teleports and region crossings).

But when jelly Dolls have been implemented, creators quickly tried to reduce the complexity of their products.

So the trick is to impose restrictions, as Wagner says, or (since I prefer to offer bonuses rather than just nerfing) to give users incentives to make proper optimized things.

[sirhc desantis]

Mostly yeah but calling bollox on 'now it is common for not a single triangle or texel in a Second Life avatar to have been defined by Linden Lab'. Every actual user still carries the under garments of the Lab avatar. And no, animesh bots do not count =^^=

[Pulsar]

The sentence "In other words, as graphics and animation quality improves, there's less left to the imagination." is true, in a way. That's what anyone could see.
And the culprit actually is...

- "it's easy to describe yourself as a dragon", because, well, you can imagine anything.

- "harder to animate a dragon in SL", because imagining something is a thing, actually creating it is another story. I can imagine a beautiful dress, but drawing or sewing it requires another set of skills and tools. You can imagine an animated dragon, but in SL you had to work around the avatar system, that was originally designed to be an human. Even the mentioned "tiny" avatars were a sort of hack. Now the "bento" skeleton has more bones, bones for wings and tails too. Still you have to create the dragon, know how to use Blender, and know how to create animations and animations that look natural for your unnatural beast. That wasn't so immediate even for the folks working on the Games of Thrones series. And more detailed and less cartoonish you want it, harder the work and effort you need.

- "and almost impossible to drive a 6 limbed dragon in VR when you have 2 tracked hands and a tracked head", because, eh, that tracked data come from your real life, not from your imagination. Whatever you can imagine, in real life you usually don't have 6 limbs... and the limbs you are moving are those of your puny human body, not your imaginary mighty dragon. Perhaps sooner or later that would be possible, however, maybe by training an AI which takes your human input and translates it to dragon movements.

[Alicia]

"The problem with the "laggy" content, instead, isn't mesh objects (a proper made and textured mesh object is quick to load and it isn't heavy to render), but the lack of restrictions/incentives." - That's where most people will disagree at. Again, the problem with SL has and will always be unoptimized mesh. LL has set the maximum for textures at 1024x1024, and most creators end up making their textures too damn big (any texture size over 1024x1024 max), which then will be forced to the max of 1024x1024; but, remember that LL never set limits on how many verts/faces a mesh item should have. The textures issues, on the other hand, can easily be fixed if people simply went with the allotted sizes (64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512 and the 1024x1024 max) SL can manage. Also, knowing how to keep the MB down on the textures also helps if the person knows what their doing in GIMP, PhotoShop, or any other photo manipulation program. When it comes to mesh, you still have mesh hair that shoots an avi's complexity near or past 100k, and the same thing can happen with jewelry, clothing, etc. Verts/faces counts also increase/decrease when you resize any mesh object (trees, shrubs, etc.) All of these individual issues ultimately becomes a huge problem that never gets handled as LL only wants to continue working as is.

Yes, you most certainly can compare 3D models made by professionals and random users in SL as everything in any and all 3D games, whether professionally or amateurly created, is all fair game.

Everyone knows that LL will never impose restrictions on how maximum number of verts a mesh item can have.

[sirhc desantis]

Dunno. We are having fun on a pod with my random stream playing. After a bit of a build. And I do lowest poly because I learn the tools.
Fun
And still cannot find an Alicia.resident in world =>> do try harder
Ah sorry I am actually in world

[Alicia]

That's because I quit using SL awhile ago, sirhc :p

The best choice, honestly, that I can make despite missing people.