Week 3: Resizing, Re-Meshing, Rigging

This week we took our 3D scans and resized them, fixed the meshes and rigged them. I decided to do this with the scan that Jiwon did of me, the one in which I’m wearing a dress. Even though I thought the dress might be a problem, I hoped it was short enough to mostly work since the arms on my other scan looked really bad.

Following the tutorials, first I brought the obj file for my scan into Maya and resized it:

Next in Wrap3 I used the based model to re-mesh my avatar. I was curious how the dress would look after this process.

This was straightforward until I ended up with a growth on my mouth! Anna explained to me that this is the mouth bag that popped out of the mesh….I didn’t have time to start over at this point, so I cleaned it up in Maya. It’s not perfect (I think if I were to use this for a project I would re-do it), but looks a lot better:

Then I uploaded it to Mixamo:

The dress looked a little weird in between the legs in wrap3, but doesn’t look too bad in the animations. Again, I think I’d use a different scan if I were doing a project with this. And had a lot of fun playing around with the animations:

There is something especially satisfying about the falling animations:

Reading Discussion Questions

1. The development of the personal bubble and power gesture is a good step towards addressing harassment in VR, but still puts the responsibility on the victim and requires constant alertness and vigilance by them to then trigger the “power gesture.” 

“For example, what if a player had tools on hand to change the outcome of the encounter before it ended in a negative way?  How different would our childhood memories of the schoolyard bully be if our bodies had been immovable when shoved, or we could mute their words at the push of a button?  Would the author’s experience have been any different if she could have reached out with a finger, and with a little flick, sent that player flying off the screen like an ant?”

I wonder - is there a way to put this responsibility and the consequences on perpetrators instead?

2. The article about the Sims was refreshing in that it is one of the only positive articles I’ve read about digital spaces recently. It made me wonder - is an environment like the Sims the solution? Still, who decides the language that is used in the parameters (I’m assuming most of the programmers + designers aren’t queer)? How does signaling work in this new world? Seeing the made me wonder what a digital world designed by the creators and users of the _personals_ instagram account would look like (now Lex.app).