Having believable characters within virtual reality can be one of the most challenging but most important components to get right within a virtual reality experience. Stefano Corazza and Mixamo.com have been working on a set of tools to make it easier to create & animate 3D characters within your virtual worlds.

Stefano talks about some of Mixamo’s services like Fuse to create characters, their auto-rigging functionality, their Decimator to optimize the polygon count, and how they have over 10,000 different animations available in different packs. They also have developed Face Plus to be able to motion capture the facial expressions and emotions for a character, which is the technology that High Fidelity is using in order to translate what your doing with your face onto a VR avatar.

Finally, he talks about the principle of the uncanny valley, and how Mixamo avoids it — as well as the importance of the expression of emotions within VR.

Mixamo also recently updated their Fuse product to make it easier to create 3D characters by making it possible to upload your own content that can be customized with their tools.

They have a couple of pricing options from pay as you go to a $1499/year professional account where you get access to all of Mixamo’s services. Fuse is also available on Steam for $99.

Reddit discussion here.

Topics

0:00 – Intro

0:34 – Emotional importance of 3D characters – Face Plus facial animation, Fuze character creator

1:56 – Optimizing high polygon count characters with Decimator & transforming Kinect scans into rigged 3D characters

2:53 – 10,000 animations in pre-set packs and importing into game engine like Unity

3:33 – Face Plus motion capture of facial expressions, Unity plug-in & variety of applications of Face Plus

4:30 – Mapping emotions to a face via abstraction process

5:34 – How Mixamo avoids the Uncanny Valley via stylized characters

6:47 – Creating efficient game characters

7:11 – How people like Nonny de la Peña are using Mixamo

7:48 – High Fidelity & their use of Face Plus & using facial animation in game play

8:41 – Pricing structure for Mixamo

9:10 – Future of Virtual Reality & importance of emotions

10:02 – Representing yourself in virtual reality

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio