“Duggly’ An Avatar of myself designed in Unreal engines metahuman Creator by me and my 7 year old daughter Octavia..

Its my birthday! Its August 5th, and once upon a time a very very very long time ago I was born, so what should one do on their birthday - why make an Avatar of oneself of course…

Being serious for a momment, one question i’m always asked when clients investigate making an Avatar for their brand is ‘what tech do you use to create them’. This is always a difficult question answer.

The reason is that the tech used, character creation, motion capture, compositing software, rendering, lighting etc, is a bit like the wild west, there are so many different types of tools and production processes and each one has advantages and disadvantages. Do I use Metahuman (awesome but not enough base templates ) do I use daz3D - loads of templates but what about that render, do we use Maya and Arnold, iClone and facial mo cap etc etc.

WHAT PLATFORM AND CHANNEL

The first question to ask is what channels will your Avatar be on, and the answer to this should be ‘the channels your target Audience live on’.

PREPARE FOR INTEROPERABILITY

However, the future of the Metaverse is that your Avatar will live on multiple verses, and each of those verses will take your base Avatar and convert the look and feel so that it is compatible with their world, as the tech level and graphics of the worlds improve so will the design of the Avatar as its teleported into different worlds.

This is starting to happen already.

So let’s look at me.

Above I have created myself in Metahuman creator. This is a relatively quick job. Taking a base character - see examples below, then tweaking.

This Avatar of myself is quite hyper real, and can be used in some more advances verses.

But what if I want to go onto somewhere like VR Chat as my Avatar (or more importantly for us, what if we see there is a good Target and Addressable Audience for one of our brands in another Verse?), do we have to make a new one? Lets say they want to go to VR Chat where the creative is very blocky? There are tech tools now that will take your Avatar and convert it so that it works on different platforms. The best of these is ‘Ready Player me’. You can see below I have uploaded my Metahuman Avatar pic, and then RPM has auto generated me for VR chat.

Lets see that a bit closer.

Its an OK copy but this will continuously improve

There are multiple other verses that they create your Avatar for aswell - see below.

This is prepping us for the interoperable metaverse future, where we can create your brand Avatar and have it move in and out, recognisable to everyone in all the Verses. And the same will also happen with NFTS - or ‘objects’ - your art, cars, clothes, these will all become interoperable - imagine what brands could do with that. Infact don’t imagine, call me and we can discuss it.

Dudley Nevill-Spencer - founder Virtual Influencer Agency

AVATAR TECH: Making me in Metahuman - how Virtual Human Avatars will become omnipresent