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Making Vex Ruby - Part 1: Origins
🕑 Added 2023-03-18 22:00:02 +0000 UTCMaking Vex Ruby is a multi part look at how Vex Ruby came to be.
Part 1 will cover her origins and the tech behind her leading up to her streaming debut.
Prototyping
It's been 3 years since Vex Ruby first came online with her mix of silly, sexy, fun. Her origins go all the way to 2016.
Back then, the ViRo team shared office space with another development team. They specialized in VR, and ViRo focused on Motion Capture. We would often share development resources since the indie life can be quite challenging. This is when we first met the girl who would become Vex Ruby.
She was a curious person full of fun, blunt, energy who wanted to tryout the motion capture suit. Team ViRo was working on telepresence with motion capture in VR and how it might apply to the adult industry. She seemed excited with the project so we grabbed an anime avatar from the Unity asset store and suited her up for motion capture. There were problems, but the prototype was solid.
Realtime avatar motion capture in Unity
Vex put on the motion capture suit the following day to try some adult actions and see what the motion capture system could handle. We started in a campfire scene and recorded her motions.
This motion capture made it into the very first ViRo Playspace dream released over a year later.
With the body motion sorted out, we needed to figure out face animation. At the time, we were using an application called FaceShift. This company was purchased by Apple which made continued support of the app difficult as we were no longer able to renew our license. We didn't know it at the time, but this turned out to be a good thing.
Realtime face motion capture in Maya
Ruby's first steps
The decision to give the project more focus happened after about a year or so. At the time, her name was "Ruby" and she helped us prototype live VR streaming with motion capture. It was still crude, but we were making progress.
Ruby testing live motion. This was her first room.
In the early days, we would invite people to connect online and visit Ruby since we were looking for any financial backing to continue development of the project. There were a lot of interested parties, but no money was raised.
We would have to take the long way.
Production began on ViRo Playspace to release VR experiences (dreams) as a way to fill in for our social features if nobody was online. We also began using patreon to let the world know what were making.
Introducing Vi Rose
Ruby would handle motion capture for the ViRo Playspace dreams and help us with prototyping things, but our first animated avatar was Vi Rose. Vi Rose's animation was unique as we opted to not use our motion capture rig. We developed a new animation system that utilized VR tracking hardware. This was much faster for capturing small things like video updates and announcements. For face animation, we started using iPhone X's ARKit to handle face animation. To our surprise, it was using FaceShift's rig (which explains what Apple did with the tech).
Vi Rose using VR tracking for animation
It was around this time we decided to give live camming a shot. Ruby had asked if there was any way she could help the studio more as she really believed in what we were making. I told her that there was one idea the team was floating around, LewdTubing. She was instantly excited and asked when we could start.
A LewdTuber is born
Production began on making a face, body, and room for Ruby. We had the general idea of pink, purple, and cyan hair to represent Ruby's bi side of things and pink/blue eyes as a throwback to old school 3D glasses. Things were coming along.
The Ruby model was made in Maya a ZBrush
It was late February of 2019 and it was testing time. We started with a simple photoshoot. Her outfit, lighting, and other elements were not done yet, but we thought it would be good to see what was working.
The next step was the name. "Ruby" was fine, but it felt incomplete. The team's lead developer threw in "Vex" and her full name was ready to go.
Testing the melting clothing
The Audition
With the model ready, it was time to have an audition to see how Vex Ruby's personality would come through. To the team's delight, she was a perfect fit for our brand of silly, safe, fun sexuality.
Check out her audition here: https://youtu.be/BC3wcyFSaA4
Vex's motions had a lot of limits, but she was ready to go. Vex Ruby began streaming the first week of March, 2020.
In Part 2 of Making Vex Ruby, we'll be taking a more technical look as we cover the rigging, hair, and animation tools we used to bring Vex to life.
Hardware
Let's break down the equipment Vex Ruby had at her streaming debut.
- Motion Capture: Natural Motion OptiTrack Flex 13 (x12) cameras
- Suit: Full body velcro suit with 49 retro reflector markers
- Face Tracking: Paw Patrol bike helmet with iPhone clamp mount (this was painful and quickly replaced)
