Wol (Mixed Reality Experience, 2023)
Character Design, Modeling and Rigging.
In joining Niantic I wanted some different challenges from what I'd experienced at Pixar, and this one certainly got to the cutting edge with an AI-powered NPC for Mixed Reality. With Wol I had a very short runway to Design, Model and Rig a new character for Niantic, debuting in a Mixed Realith educational experience showcasing its 8th Wall platform. Powered by InWorld's conversational AI tools for NPCs, our small but mighty Character-centric team at Niantic collaborated with the talented Liquid City team in London which was contracted to head up the project, including working with InWorld to develop an advanced AI "brain".
Effectively, I Designed, Modeled and Rigged Won in less than 5 weeks, plus 1 week I needed to research Maya rigging tools and learn how to use one (I ended up using MGear, which was very intuitive to me as someone used to character builds and crafting a bit of Python code to make it all work!). Wol's design is most closely inspired by the Northern Saw-Whet Owl, with a squat teardrop shape and wings that can form fingers. There was something funny about a bird who enjoys bird-watching, so Wol is equipped with binoculars and a messenger bag.
Try it out here! You can play a basic experience on a smartphone, though it's best experienced on a Meta Quest Pro headset.
https://meetwol.com
Trailer for the experience. I was responsible for Designing, Modeling and Rigging the Owl ("Wol") on a tight schedule, collaborating remotely with multiple small crews in the US and London.
Throughout the process, I like to organize referece materials, sketches, discussion notes, draw-overs, and 3D screenshots in one big Figma board that reads left to right chronologically. Having the history makes it easy to reference and communicate.
Here's a close-up of some of the earliest sketches, a more cup-like / pygmy owl shape. The character need was very open-ended (we just needed a warm "teacher"/"guide"), so I liked to find actors or reference images that captured personality inspiration.
We realized we needed to suggest more of a teardrop shape to get the "owl" read, and experimented with accessories. We liked the joyful feel of this drawing.
Exploratory sketches were done *fast* and *loose*, bouncing ideas off the Niantic-side manager (Pam Choy) regularly for feedback.
Feathers around the eyes evolved into a kind of "eyeglasses", with floating eyebrows.
Narrowing down on some big shapes thoughts.
Sketches are still loose, but here we have just enough to start pushing around some forms in Maya. At this point we wanted the head and body to be a continuous form with no 180 head turns.
Because I handled design, modeling, and rigging myself, our first pass at the model ("V0") was intended to get an early version into test poses and AR as quickly as possible so we could evaluate the design in context and iterate on the "hands".
From the V0 design, we decided to lose the "horns" and hone in on a Saw Whet species of Owl. This drawer includes my own notes (brown) as well as those of the texture artist who was not brought into the process.
Final Asset (V1) - Texturing by Mieke Hutchins (http://miekehutchins.com/_
In the final asset, we separated the head from the body ("Eve style") to better work with the head tracking needs of the experience (we had no idea where the audience would be in space!)
The asset was kept light and tidy, with some impressions of feathers worked into the final model.
MGear for Maya was used as a rigging framework, and allowed us to make the most of a fast window for notes. The Rig was handed off to a set of animators at Future House Studios directed by Kaan Kayimoglu at Niantic.
And here's Wol! Note there was one substantial caveat to working so fast in emerging tech: Wol's voice in the experience is male due to technical limitations in the mobile-peformant inWorld libraries at the time.