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Creating Avatars with Fuse, Mixamo, and Blender for High Fidelity Overview This document will walk you through the steps of creating an avatar for High Fidelity. ● ● ● ●
Create an avatar in Adobe Fuse Upload the avatar to Mixamo to use an auto-rigger to rig your model’s skeleton Make adjustments to model materials using Blender Package the model in High Fidelity for use as an avatar
Setup In this document, we will be using Adobe Fuse to create avatars for High Fidelity. To create these avatars, you will need to do the following: 1. Save this texture to a directory where you will remember. You will need it later when we are adjusting textures and materials in Blender. 2. Create an account with adobe.com and download creative cloud 3. Download Fuse from here: https://www.adobe.com/products/fuse.html or from within your Creative Cloud application 4. Download and install Blender Creating an Avatar with Fuse Fuse allows you to create custom avatars with a variety of modular components. We are looking to create a number of unique, interesting avatars that people can select from in High Fidelity. 1. Launch Fuse and create an avatar. Try picking a face from here. Don’t spend too much time trying to be perfect, just try to make it look similar to one of the people in the picture. 2. Give the character unique clothing fabric options - don’t just use the defaults. You can modify the different clothing options with materials and colors in the ‘Textures’ tab of Fuse 3. Save your Fuse character
Upload and Rig your Avatar in Mixamo Mixamo is a rigging system for avatars that have been created using Fuse. From inside of Fuse: 1. Click the 'Save to Mixamo' button in Fuse 2. Give your avatar a unique name and then click the Save button in the Creative Cloud dialog. Your avatar will be exported to the auto-rigger 3. On the Adobe/Mixamo page, make sure that Facial Blendshapes are ‘enabled’ and Skeleton LOD is set to ‘standard’ 4. Click the Finish button 5. When the model is successfully rigged, click the 'View In My Assets' button 6. From the model’s preview screen, click the 'Queue Download' button 7. Select Format = fbx and Pose = T-Pose options on the subsequent dialog then click the 'Queue Download' button 8. From the Downloads view, make sure the newly rigged avatar is selected and click the ‘Download' button
Fixing Materials and Textures using Blender We will be using Blender to fix material appearances for our avatar, and using the eyelash texture that we downloaded earlier to fix the eyelashes on our avatar. Adjusting Materials and Textures for our Avatar 1. In Blender, Select File/Import FBX and choose the avatar fbx you have just saved, then Import FBX 2. From the Outliner, open the ‘Armature’ tree then select the top most item (i.e. Body) 3. Select the Material tab
4. Click the Specular color (set to white) and make it 100% black 5. Repeat this step for every avatar item in the outliner 6. Starting at the top of the outliner, select the top most item under armature then select the texture tab 7. Un-check any mapping to textures that have the name “Specular”, and “Gloss” 8. Repeat this step with all items related to the avatar Updating Eyelash Material and Texture for our Avatar 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Select ‘Eyelashes' from the Outliner Select the Materials tab Click the ‘+’ button to the right of the material list create a new material slot Click the '+ New' button next to the material combobox to add a new material Double click the new material, most likely named Material.001, and rename to ‘lashes' With the Eyelashes layer selected in the outliner, and the Lashes material highlighted in the material editor, use the Tab key to go into Edit Mode 7. Click the ‘Assign' button in the material editor 8. Scroll down in the Material tab until you see the ‘Transparency' section. Check the Transparency box and change the ‘Alpha' value to 0.00 9. Set the specular color for the Lashes material to black 10. While still editing the Eyelashes, select the Texture tab 11. Click the '+ New' button next to the texture combobox 12. From the Image section select ‘Open' and find the lashes texture named ‘mixamo_eyelashes' you previously downloaded 13. Check the 'Show Alpha' option in the Preview section 14. Make sure the 'Use Alpha' option is checked in the Image/Source area 15. Scroll down in the Texture tab to the Influence section and check the ‘Alpha’ box 16. Click the ‘Pack texture’ option to include the texture in the model 17. Select File/Export/FBX 18. Change the Path Mode to ‘Copy' 19. Select the 'Embed Textures' option next to the dropdown options that now say Copy 20. Give the Avatar a unique name and click the Export FBX button
Generate an .fst and Texture Folder for High Fidelity The last step to use our avatar in High Fidelity is to package it using Interface. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Launch High Fidelity’s Interface application Enable ‘Advanced Menus’ under Settings > Advanced Menus Go to Edit > Package Model Click ‘Browse’ under ‘Model File’ and select the FBX that you exported from Blender, then click OK Click OK on the next menu to export the model Create a new folder AvatarName_Exported Select your folder and click ‘Select Folder’ Your output folder should contain a .fst file and a folder with textures in it Zip your AvatarName_Exported folder and upload it to your Worklist task
Additional Resources Blender Documentation Create a 3D Avatar with Fuse
