WoW Characters in VRChat

Friday, June 27, 2014

Sunday and Wednesday I showed off the latest addition to my collection of VRChat avatars, and along with it the inclusion of avatars like it from my avatar services. I can now do WoW characters. This is an exact copy of my WoW Rogue Ubaest from the end of Cataclysm.

And for comparison, heres a real screenshot of my Rogue the day I got his Legendary daggers.

As I've been asked about creating avatars for people more and more, I've been trying to expand my menu as it were. WoW characters seemed like one of the best inclusions. It's been a popular game for years, and many people have spent a lot of time behind the eyes/head of their characters. In a sense, MMOs are a pre-pre-metaverse were people ARE their characters. So some people may want to continue that into VRChat.

At this time I can do any character race/sex, facial, hair, skin color, and armor from Cata and before. I currently have to rig/skin the models my self, but they're low enough polygon count to where its not to tough, and just a factor of time. In the future I hope to add animations too.

I also debuted a new self-added VRChat feature as it were. Custom nameplates. We have seen the white text with a black drop shadow for awhile. It changes to red text when someones talking. Well, I can change that and spruce it up a little. On my Rogue avatar I created the name plate in the exact style of WoW, complete with color and font. I even added a fake guild tag to better illustrate the idea. The cool part is that this custom nameplate even changes when you talk too. While not exactly WoW like (I never used the internal WoW voice chat, so I don't know for certain), the name changes to red while you're talking.

This of course is a simple example of what could be done with custom nameplates. The names are just images, so anything that can be drawn with a image can be used for a nameplate. They can even be animated! Though I wouldn't do much myself beyond a simple few frames. My skills are growing in many areas, but I'm still not much of an artist right now. I'm capable of some thing, but can't promise much.

Interest in hiring me to create VRChat avatars has been picking up a little more lately. And with that I'm finding a need to take it a bit more seriously and have quicker answers to what I would charge for what. I created that page last week in part as a portfollio of what I can do. And since then I've been working on what specific services I can offer and at what prices. I won't be posting my prices publicly, but people will be able to email me for them if they're interested. It's a bit of a balancing act figuring out prices, considering my skill/quality, time invested, and keeping things cheap enough that people will want to hire me.

Like donations, anything I make right now from creating avatars will go to my DK2 fund. So if you want to help me reach that goal, maybe this will be of interest to you. Though I will still take donations. =)

As always, you can contact me at darkakuma [ at ] z-net.us.