Meet ExplodedView Digital Doubles

We had the pleasure to create Exploded View founders' digital doubles as 3D models fully rigged, animated, and optimized for game engines. We managed to digitize Marcin and Piotr - people we have never met in real life - completely remotely from only reference photos and face models from the iPhone 3D scanning app.

What is digital double?

Digital double is a 3D representation of a real-life character that can be used as a replacement or support for his real-life counterpart. You might be familiar with digital doubles in movie production where for certain visual effects a real actor is replaced with his digital clone to perform stunts or action sequences that cannot be achieved in real-life or are too expensive to conduct with practical effects.

Creation process - How real is enough

When designing digital doubles it's crucial to achieve a resemblance of character to the real-life counterpart. The greatest obstacle here is how we perceive faces. Our brains are trained to find similarities and recognize people we know which makes the whole process challenging. Not only we need to pay attention to create a biologically correct human face but we also need to recreate key features that will light up the feeling that the audience knows this digital person.

Due to the current situation, we had to complete the whole process remotely. The early stage of work was done based on reference pictures - portrait photos taken from different angles. Additionally, we used a simplified facial 3D scan as a reference for head geometry. We used the Bellus 3D app for that.

The appearance of the characters

For digital doubles design, we used Reallusion Character Creator v 3.0 combined with Maya and Substance Painter in our pipeline. That kind of workflow allowed us to utilize stunning features of the Reallusion suite while maintaining a custom and unique look for our characters. Thanks to unified body mesh we were able to prepare multiple customized outfits for our client avatars. Depending on occasion Marcin can appear in different outfits or even change them on the fly.

Calibration

After the final iteration of 3D models, we moved on to set up a unity scene and test drive our models and animations. The project aimed to give our clients the ability to use their digital doubles as their VR avatars. So the endless process of testing, calibration, and corrections has begun.

Turning Digital Double into Virtual Being - Video Content creation in Unity

The whole point of creating one’s own digital double is to have someone that can scale your online and offline presence. Currently, our Virbe SDK can be used inside Unity to combine 3D digital double or any other character with the conversation engine provided by Virbe. 

If you are already familiar with chatbots and have one created in Dialogflow, you can use our SDK to integrate your chatbot with Virbe characters. If you are interested in trying out our product sign up here.