E-MAIL: chrisleathers@me.com
PH: +1-917-583-2673
Worked on a small team to rebuild Virbela's existing avatar system and UX/UI from the ground up. The process took a good year. The goal was flexibility, optimization and to fit a global user base and wide range of cultures. There were a lot of other considerations to the avatars and their role, that made the Virbela virtual experience one of the best, most immersive and easy to use systems I have ever used.
The avatar system was designed around a single avatar base model, and clothing sets, which were then morphed into every concievable character the software could produce, which was vast. I spent the majority of my time creating the rigging and blend shapes that worked behind the scenes to make this possible and exporting the rigged assets to unity.
Here you can also see an early beta mok-up of the UI that I worked on. These avatars were all realized usiung Unity's URP render pipeline.
Shout out to the great team of people here, Sheldon Brown, Josh Palang, Joel, Jacob, Larry, Nicole, among others.. !! who had the passion and fortitude to get these avatars across the finish line.
As a solo 3D character artist for a period of time at Freeverse Games in Brooklyn, I had a chance to push my rigging skills and accumulate technical solutions around creating game engine ready hoards. Yes I know, they don't look like typical bowling league bowlers but in FLICK BOWLING, you traveled throught time and bowled as your favorite historical characters hence the Mongoliam warrior and WWII airplane mechanic.
The creation of these characters, start to finish was basically on my plate. I found it helpful to develop a pipeline that could handle a wide number of assets and account for different, heights, shapes and sizes, all based on a single rig and mesh.
Shout out to this amazing team, Ian Smith, Bruce, Kevin, Denise, our remote programmer who wrote scripts for keeping track of key frame ranges in Maya, Pat, and others I will add when I have time to make sure I remember them correctly.
FLICK BASKETBALL was an OFFICIAL NBA title, and I modeled about 50 real world basketball players from real teams with real source images sent to us by the actual NBA!! Far larger than the iphone screen resolution could showcase. Still pretty cool though.
All 50 players had to be rigged and animated. I took advantantage of every trick I could find to automate the stages of this process combining Maya clips, skin weight transfers, animation re-direction, and a few other tricks, I could tell you but I'd have to kill you.. things that made edits and animation easier and kept everything accessible.
We met very light weight, low poly requirements, yet you can still hear the crown cheer practically. Shout out to this amazing team, Ian Smith, Bruce, Kevin, Denise, our remote programmer who wrote scripts for keeping track of key frame ranges in Maya, Pat, and others I will add when I have time to make sure I remember them correctly.