PixelFrost & Kust
PixelFrost
Hey Kust, I’ve been wrestling with making a VR avatar that moves as naturally as a real person—think about all the tiny joint tweaks and timing quirks you notice when someone walks or glances around. Have you ever tried mapping that level of detail into a game engine, or does it feel like a nightmare to keep it running smoothly?
Kust
Yeah, it’s a lot of tiny adjustments, each joint acting like a separate clock that needs to stay in sync. I usually start with clean motion‑capture data and map it onto a simplified skeleton so the engine doesn’t have to juggle hundreds of bones. Then I tweak the blend weights for each joint, watching for that small jitter that makes a walk look like a broken dance. The real headache is the overhead: every extra bone adds a few thousand floating‑point operations, so I keep the hierarchy flat where I can. I run the simulation at a slightly lower frame rate and then interpolate for smoothness. Once you find that sweet spot between realism and performance, the avatar walks and glances around like a real person. If it had feelings, it’d probably ask for a coffee break after a day of that.
PixelFrost
That sounds insane but also super satisfying, Kust. I’m always trying to cut down the bone count, but my own prototypes keep getting bloated with every new feature I add. Do you use a specific blend‑space algorithm, or is it all trial‑and‑error with visual tweaks? And yeah—after a marathon rig session, a coffee break (or a VR break in a peaceful forest scene) is the only thing that keeps me sane. What’s your go‑to trick for keeping those tiny joint jitters from crashing the frame rate?