Metafactory Avatar Wearables

jin · June 5, 2022, 2:44am

Avatar Wearables Master thread

MetaFactory’s VR/Metaverse crew has been hard at work digitizing (almost) every physical piece of MetaFactory merch into interoperable avatar wearables. Owners will get access to all current and future file types for maximum metaverse interoperability.

The reason it’s taken awhile for the digital wearables to reach market is because of our desire to build with intention. Currently, the metaverse is a series of fragmented worlds, many of which are walled gardens solely focused on their own immediate platform mechanics / economics vs. a larger, interconnected experience.

Every virtual world desires to maintain control over its economic incentives pertaining to currencies, land, wearables and more. There is, however, a much greater opportunity in the positive sum alignment of these platforms and their networks, and we’re working hard to demonstrate these opportunities. See: The Virtual Silk Road

Instead of minting NFTs without considering challenges of interoperability and user experience, we took our time evaluating options and speaking with others in the space about how they intended to solve this problem. MetaFactory believes it found the right solution via a collaboration with Ceramic Network.

As mentioned previously, MetaFactory views wearables as an extension of one’s decentralized identity. They need to communicate and interface with one’s avatars, personal data, reputations, etc. Ceramic provides the data layer for Web3. It allows MetaFactory to link a single ‘master’ NFT and update the metadata (file types) in real time. In other words, MetaFactory can future proof its NFTs and provide support for increasing platforms and/or ones that don’t exist yet. The alternative would have been to mint a different NFT for each platform based on its particular technical standards, etc. which is counterintuitive to an open metaverse.

Compatibility

VRoid / VRM

A-pose

Mainly used for product displays and renders

T-pose

Used when adding wearable to custom avatars

Cryptovoxels

Combination of automatic and manual methods to voxelize wearables for Cryptovoxels and later on Sandbox compatibility.

jin · June 6, 2022, 1:26am

Clo3D to Blender

In the spirit of sharing

A-pose

How the file looks when opened

This is what a default export looks like, which works great for any kind of product rendering. There are 12 textures which takes up additional draw calls and the mesh / textures are not yet optimized for avatar use, but that’s okay because it’s a-pose.

I believe we should use Blender as a source of truth. Some stats:

271k triangles
18 materials

After processing via Simplygon we get:

1.6k triangles
2 materials

This model is now ready to be showcased in virtual worlds and lightweight web frontends such as the 3D storefront.

T-pose

Using Marvelous Designer, we can unzip the jacket and simulate it then pause at any moment to export a mesh of the current frame. I did a couple examples shown below and used the shrinkwrap modifier to get a snug fit with different base avatars.

Can also use the blender sculpt tool to get an approx fit. Once the jacket is on, can delete underlying mesh that isn’t used. Avatars have all sorts of ways to break, so if you really just want a simplified posable model you might be best processing it through mixamo or rigging software again.

Because of the seams, you need to retopo the wearable to ensure there’s no weird glitches when worn like how you see here:

Here are how the options looked when getting a good export of the metagear jacket out of MD:

jin · January 3, 2023, 9:50pm

VRoid Wearables

VRoid studio is the most popular avatar creation program for making VRM avatars. You can download it for free, and the things you create on it are truly yours.

VRoid textures that you can import to customize your character with will be one of the file formats that ship with the release of wearables. You can customize and easily add wearables to your avatar then export as a VRM to begin importing into different worlds. Studio also contains a photography section that allows you to take some pics, here’s a few shots with various MF wearables:

We are about 80% the way through making digital versions of all the wearables, the rest of which will go quickly.