Category: wolf3d

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SideQuest Teams Up With Cross-Platform Avatar Creator Ready Player Me

SideQuest - Ready Player Me

SideQuest has been an essential part of the Oculus Quest indie community ever since its debut in 2019, allowing players to access early projects by developers. Continuing to foster that community SideQuest has partnered up with cross-game avatar creation platform Ready Player Me so that users can keep a consistent player appearance across support apps.

Ready Player Me

Ready Player Me is a fairly simple solution for the creation of 3D avatars and it’s completely free to use. Built by Wolf3D and released earlier this year, Ready Player Me can create an avatar from a selfie, after which you can then further tweak your look, or start completely from scratch, no pic required.

Its inclusion into SideQuest means that users can use the system for their profile avatar and then in the future use the avatar in supported titles. There’s an ever-growing selection of apps that use Ready Player Me including VRChat, LIV, MeetinVR, Somnium Space and vSpatial to name a few.

“Working with Ready Player Me will not only help bring SideQuest players into the metaverse but also allow for a highly customisable form of self-expression for all our community,” says SideQuest CEO, Shane Harris. “The VR space is rapidly becoming the creative outlet for developers and players alike to discover, experiment and play, and here at SideQuest we couldn’t be happier to be a driving force behind that. We have so many exciting plans for our work with Ready Player Me, and look forward to supporting our community with integration in the future.”

Ready Player Me - Wolf3D

“SideQuest is empowering smaller developers to build VR games and share them with the platform’s vast community of players,” said Timmu Tõke, Wolf3D’s CEO. “Our partnership is a big step in making the dream of the open metaverse a reality. We will work together to connect hundreds of the virtual worlds available on SideQuest and let anyone travel between them with their Ready Player Me avatars.”

Check out the readyplayer.me website to see all the supported apps and for further updates, keep reading VRFocus.

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Ready Player Me 3D Avatars Step Into Somnium Space’s Metaverse

Somnium Space - Ready Player Me

Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me avatars are already used in plenty of social virtual reality (VR) apps including VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, and MeetinVR. Today, another social world has been added to that list with Somnium Space now supporting the avatar creation software.

Somnium Space - Ready Player Me

While Somnium Space already had a basic avatar creation solution, the addition of Ready Player Me greatly expands the customisation options for users. It also enables Somnium Space users to utilise the avatar apps’ most interesting feature, the ability to create a character simply by uploading a selfie.

All of this can be achieved directly inside Somnium Space without any need for a separate app. You can create an avatar directly inside the Somnium WEB client before stepping into the virtual world. After uploading a photo – or you can skip that part and build an avatar from scratch – you’re presented with a massive list of customisation options to alter facial features, hair and hair colour as well as clothing.

“We are very excited to partner with Wolf3D and bring native support for Ready Player Me avatars into our Somnium WEB client. This is another important step towards our ultimate goal of interoperability. Allowing users to express themselves across the Metaverse is one of the most important aspects of their digital existence,” said Artur Sychov, Founder & CEO of Somnium Space in a statement. “We are committed to this goal and happy to add another layer of self-customization alongside user-generated Somnium Blockchain (NFT) Avatars and Somnium Classical Avatars.”

Somnium Space - Ready Player Me

Somnium Space has been running since 2018, providing a virtual world where users buy land parcels that they can build upon or sell if they so wish. Built on the Ethereum blockchain network, you can join Somnium Space for free and explore its metaverse using PC VR headsets or online through a PC or mobile device. Because of its blockchain backbone, assets, avatars, and land parcels – basically any in-game assets – can be tokenized and stored in a blockchain wallet as NFTs to be sold through marketplaces like Opensea.

As Somnium Space continues to expand its feature set during 2021, VRFocus will keep you updated.

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VR Chat Avatar Creator Commits To Fixes & New Options For Better Representation

Wolf3D is committing to fast, important fixes and a greater set of options for its Ready Player Me avatar creator.

Yesterday we reported on the launch of a new feature for the free to use platform that lets users import virtualized versions of themselves into VRChat based on a single photo. In our own testing the feature worked well but, following launch, we noticed comments online about results for people from more diverse backgrounds. The creator didn’t always immediately provide an accurate representation of a user’s skin color, for example, and others couldn’t find the hairstyles and other options that best represented them.

We brought those concerns to Wolf3D CEO Timmu Tõke, who told us fixes would roll out starting today.

ready player me vrchat 2

“First, we’re aware that we’re not doing the best job in representing all ethnicities well in the VRChat avatar creator and our entire team is working hard on improving that immediately,” Tõke said.

Over email, he explained two crucial issues with yesterday’s launch. The first addresses missing hairstyles.

“We were in a hurry to launch and decided to disable some “heavier” (in terms of poly count) hairstyles to fit the Quest poly limit,” Tõke explained. “These hairstyles turned out to be important in representing people of color. We’re working on bringing them back ASAP and will be deploying new hairstyles throughout today.”

Another issue that we were able to replicate ourselves was that bright lighting in some photos made skin tones appear immediately lighter than they should have been. “We launched VRChat with an older texturing system, which depends a lot on the lighting of the input photo,” Tõke explained. “We will deploy a fix in an hour [at the time of writing] that improves that significantly.”

Looking further down the line, Tõke promised that Ready Player Me will offer better options for gender neutral avatars (the current solution predicts body types based on photos) and will also add more religious assets. In fact the company has just added a hijab option and plans to implement more along with more facial cutomization options and styles including hairstyles and assets for all ethnicities.

“Our prediction is based on a diverse dataset of 20,000 face scans,” Tõke added. “We’re doing a good job in generating diverse, realistic avatars in the background, but we can do the stylization part where we make the avatar more cartoon-like a lot better.”

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‘VRChat’ Can Now Import Free Customizable ‘Ready Player Me’ Avatars

Ready Play Me, the free avatar maker from Wolf3D, now supports exporting avatars to VRChat, making it quick and easy to get a customizable avatar into one of the most popular social VR applications.

While VRChat is host to tons of zany user-created avatar choices (or you can build your own from the ground up if you’re technically skilled), sometimes you want to embody an avatar that feels personal to you. But how do you get one?

Ready Player Me is a free avatar maker which now supports VRChat. With its web-based tool, you can create a custom avatar in a matter of minutes, then import it directly into VRChat with the push of a button (at the time of writing the site warns it may take 10–15 minutes for the avatar to appear in VRChat due to demand).

To make your own Ready Player Me avatar for VRChat, just use the web-based avatar creator here (you can start by taking a selfie, or skip that step and go directly to customization). Once you’re happy with your avatar, click the ‘Done’ button at the top right, then click ‘Import to VRChat’ in the pop-up menu.

Ready Player Me avatars are supported by a growing list of VR applications like Mozilla Hubs, LIV, MeetinVR, and more, now including VRChat. Avatars can also be downloaded in the .fbx format.

The company behind the tool, Wolf3D, says its avatars are compatible with VRChat’s latest avatar system called Avatars 3.0 (AV3), which allows players to use the game’s built-in expression system for emotes and other avatar actions.

While it’s great to have a simple tool for avatar creation, it’s still clearly early days for Ready Player Me, which currently offers customization of hair, facial hair, and outfits, but lacks key options like like facial structure, height, and weight.

With the company raising $1.3 million last year, we expect to see the options fleshed out in due time. Though we don’t expect it to be free indefinitely—the obvious future for a tool like Ready Player Me is to offer a basic set of free customization options, while keeping a large wardrobe of premium styles which users can buy with real money.

The post ‘VRChat’ Can Now Import Free Customizable ‘Ready Player Me’ Avatars appeared first on Road to VR.

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Wolf3D Makes VRChat Avatar Creation Selfie Simple

Ready Player Me - Wolf3D

Step into the huge online social world of VRChat and you’ll find there’s plenty to explore. Before you get that far you’ll need some sort of avatar. Whilst you’ll be provided with a basic body and then given community created ones to select from, you might want to make your own. And that’s where Wolf3D steps in, making that process simple with its newly integrated app Ready Player Me.

Ready Player Me

Rather than having to download the VRChat software development kit (SDK) to create an avatar all you need to do is head to the Ready Player Me website, upload a selfie or take a photo with your webcam and Wolf3D’s software will do the rest. After that, you can further tweak your avatar with a selection of customisation options. Once finished click the “Import to VRChat,” log in to your account and wait about five minutes for it to appear in your avatar list.

You don’t even need a photo, bypassing that stage to create an avatar from the 200 customization options which include outfits, hairstyles, and tattoos. Whichever method is chosen, your new VRChat avatar can be used on both PC and Oculus Quest versions. More customization options will continue to be added.

“For many, creating an avatar in VRChat is both a daunting and very important task,” said Graham Gaylor, Co-Founder & CEO of VRChat in a statement. “We’re excited to work with Wolf3D to help make avatar creation easier and more accessible for everyone in the VRChat universe!”

Ready Player Me - Wolf3D

Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me is a cross-platform avatar creator which has been available for a while now. Compatible with apps including MeetinVR, Mozilla Hubs, and LIV, the platform offers a free Unity 3D SDK for those developers wishing to integrate avatar creation into their project.

Avatars are an important part of any social VR world, with each platform offering greater flexibility for users. As further updates are released for Ready Player Me, VRFocus will let you know.

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LIV Now Supports Full-body Avatars from ReadyPlayerMe, Making it Easy to Stream VR Without a Green Screen

Many VR streamers use complicated mixed reality setups to show themselves from a third-person perspective inside the virtual world. LIV, a leading tool which makes this possible, now supports free, customizable, full-body avatars from ReadyPlayerMe, making it possible to stream your avatar inside of VR without the need for a green screen.

In addition to true mixed reality streaming, Liv has supported streaming with avatars for some time. However, actually finding a unique avatar for yourself was no simple task. Now, Liv has partnered with avatar maker ReadyPlayerMe to make it as simple as can be.

ReadyPlayerMe allows you to build a free full-body avatar—optionally based on a photo of yourself—in mere minutes. You can use the avatar as the character in select Liv-supported VR games, allowing stream viewers to see your movements in third-person.

Here’s an example of a ReadyPlayerMe avatar in Pistol Whip streamed via Liv:

Avatars from ReadyPlayMe are moderately customizable, and easy enough to get something you’re happy with relatively quickly, though we hope to see more customization options in the future (like height, build, and more control over outfits).

Image courtesy ReadyPlayerMe

You can make your own ReadyPlayMe avatar to import to Liv right here. If you want to download your avatar for some other use, you can make one here and download it at the end of the process as a .GLB file for use in other applications.

Streamer Atom Bomb Body also has a detailed walkthrough for configuring Liv with your new avatar here:

 

The post LIV Now Supports Full-body Avatars from ReadyPlayerMe, Making it Easy to Stream VR Without a Green Screen appeared first on Road to VR.

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Wolf3D Raises $1.3M to Further Support Its Cross-game Avatar Platform

Wolf3D, a Tallinn, Estonia-based 3D scanning and avatar company, has raised $1.3 million in its latest funding round, something it says will help further improve its cross-game avatar platform.

The investment round includes support by Trind Ventures, Presto Ventures, Koha Capital, Spring Capital, Contriber Ventures, and various angel investors. This brings the company’s overall funding to $2.8 million.

Called Ready Player Me, the company’s software is said to allow anyone to create “a personal full-body avatar from a selfie,” which critically aims to be platform and game agnostic. Wolf3D says it can support “many different art styles of avatars for all kinds of game styles and genres.”

The company notes that its latest cash injection will fuel “the next level with full-body personal avatars for games.”

Image courtesy Wolf3D

Wolf3D has been developing 3D scanning tech since its founding in 2014. Six years later, the company is now making its avatar scanning technology available for small and mid-sized developers, as well as providing it to select companies for free.

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The company admits that a monolithic ‘metaverse’ is probably not the way it will all shake out in the future, which is why its building cross-platform services. The long-term goal, the company says, is to make its avatar tech “a link between many different virtual experiences, adding them together into one big virtual world that you can explore seamlessly with your avatar and the same set of friends.”

Food for thought: the company’s apparent ambitions depend upon either platform holders or groups of individual developers to implement their system in the first place. While there’s no telling what the VR landscape will look like in the future, if Wolf3D can provide a ready-made solution that’s flexible and good enough, it’s much more likely that an acquisition is in their future rather than taking on the difficult job of stitching together the still largely fragmented digital world as it stands today.

The post Wolf3D Raises $1.3M to Further Support Its Cross-game Avatar Platform appeared first on Road to VR.

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Two Tools to Make Your Own Avatar for Social VR Apps like ‘VRChat’ & ‘Mozilla Hubs’

With growing usage of social virtual worlds and spaces like VRChat and Mozilla Hubs, you might be looking for a way to make your own avatar to represent yourself in VR. Here are two user-friendly avatar character creator apps for that purpose which won’t require the use of developer-level tools like Unity, Blender, etc.

Updated – March 3rd, 2021

Ready Player Me

Compatible with VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, LIV, MeetinVR and More

Ready Player Me is a free web-based avatar creator which allows you to make avatars which are easily imported into VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, LIV, MeetinVR, and more, as well as being easily portable to other applications which support the .glb or .fbx file formats.

The Ready Player Me avatar creator works on both desktop and mobile devices. Start by picking the Ready Player Me avatar maker for the app you’re targeting:

Make a Ready Player Me Avatar For:

VRChat | Mozilla Hubs | LIV | General Purpose (.glb) | General Purpose (.fbx)

You’ll first be prompted to take a selfie to form the foundation of your avatar (though you can optionally skip this step and start from scratch). From there you can define features like hair, eyebrows, eye color, glasses, and clothing. The number of options is fairly limited for now, but we hope to see them grow with time.

When you’re done making your own VR avatar, you’ll be shown a button or given instructions to import the avatar into the app you’ve selected, or you can download the avatar itself in .glb or .fbx depending upon which option you started with.

Tafi Avatars

Compatible with VRChat

Tafi Avatars VRChat Edition is a freemium app which lets you configure and build a VRChat avatar.

With Tafi, you have control over your avatar’s body properties (like height, body shape, skin color, head shape, eye color, hairstyle, etc) as well as clothing and accessories (like shirts, pants, shoes, hats, tattoos, earrings, etc).

The app uses a ‘freemium’ model which allows you to pick from a range of free options, while many options are premium and paid with in-app currency. When you first make your Tafi account, you’ll be given 1,000 coins (enough to buy a premium hairstyle or article of clothing); if you want to buy more premium options you can purchase more starting at $2 per 1,060 coins.

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When you’re done building your avatar in the Tafi creator, you can link the application to your VRChat account and then upload your newly created avatar directly to your account for use.

Tafi says that its avatars are automatically optimized to work on both the PC and Quest versions of VRChat; the avatars are also fully rigged for IK, mouth, and eye animation.

As far as we can see at this time, Tafi Avatar VRChat Edition doesn’t offer any kind of direct download or export of your avatar, which means your avatar is not currently portable or editable in other applications.

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It’s early days for the world of VR avatar creation, and if you aren’t willing to get your hands dirty with 3D modeling and animation tools, the options for easily creating your own for use in VR remain fairly slim.

In the future we hope to see more social VR apps support external avatars so that users have more options for defining what they look like in VR, and the ability to have a persistent virtual persona across VR applications.

Are there any other user-friendly tools out there which make avatars for use in VR? Let us know in the comments!

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