Digital VR artist, looking for direction

[Whystler]

I've been working in 3d for ... a long time. And lately I've been playing with a particular VR platform that is promising, doesn't require fancy hardware (ie. a headset, although you can use one) other than a computer or a mobile device. Users can enter these worlds and choose from a variety of character avatars available.

At the moment, I'm looking for a little direction in my creation of 3d rooms and characters. Around 2001, I made a couple of rooms in a very old platform that no longer exists for a roleplaying group. It was a rewarding experience, and I might want to revist that.

I was thinking that either a parlor larp sort of experience with a set number of avatars to represent characters would work. But also, an ongoing roleplay scene would be interesting (ie. the hall of a lady/lord , or a town square).

Is this something that would interest the roleplay community in general?

I'm not sure where to put an example of my current work. I was thinking maybe it belongs in the Creative forum. But roleplaying would also take place off of this site on the VR platform, so I'm not certain if it should go in the offsite recruitment area. I'm really just looking to talk about it as a possibility at the moment, so perhaps I'll post a link of something here for you to see as an example...

This is a toy ballroom I recently made. It would be good for characters who are toys, and I'll post pictures of the two avatars I've made for it so far...

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And here are a couple of pictures of the avatars. Note that the avatars in this platform don't have legs that move really, and there are no arms, but disembodied hands do appear when using a headset so that you can touch things. So perhaps as a roleplay environment it would be more suited to things like robots that float, or toys, or some sort of surreal or alien world. Unless you can overlook the armless, legless thing, and just pretend

 

[_Exodus_]

That’s cool. It certainly sounds like a cool idea. How you would get everyone in and going is something entirely different.
Would they create their own avatars?

 

[Whystler]

Well the easiest option with the most flexibikity would be to create a few simple avatars, and the toy example would fit best for this, and then get people to paint them themselves. This 3d platform has retexturing of the avatars if the maker has allowed it. However, that would involve a little skill on the part of the player to use a paint program, but truly if you printed out the avatar "map" you could paint/draw directly on it irl and then scan that and upload it as the avatar texture. Its interesting how rp has relied mostly on the skill of writing. With this, you would be able to develop and use your visual art skills to create characters.

Another option, in the case of parlour larping that has set characters you play in a single game or limited campaign, then i would just make the possible characters.

And finally, i have seen an avatar system that a user made in this platform, that allows the player to mix and match avatar parts and change the colours. Since the platform is open source and mozilla encourages forks in the code, this is possible in the long run but its not part of my ability just yet. That said if someone makes that in such a way that I can custom configure it, then that would be useful for this i think.