S.T.E.L.A. from "STARSHOT" (Senior Capstone work)

Meet S.T.E.L.A! Your Space Travel Electronic Life Assistant and AI pilot of the Outer Reach Expeditions space ship! While keeping the crewmates safe is her top priority, S.T.E.L.A. also loves sitcoms, fashion, and she even keeps a blog about all the drama on happening on the ship!
Over the past 9+ Months have worked as a lead character and motion capture artist alongside a team of 12 others on our senior capstone game, "STARSHOT", a hand tracked VR game made in Unity ! It has been incredible process and I am so proud of all we have accomplished :) Feel free to check out our website here: https://oregames.wixsite.com/starshot
Over the development cycle, I concepted S.T.E.L.A., 3D modeled and sculpted her, built her rig and weight painted it, textured her, built a facial blend tree, hooked said blend tree up to Unreal Engines Live Link face, hopped into a mocap suit to act out her lines, cleaned 100's of takes of Mocap data before I retargeted it, and even tried my hand at voice acting. Basically, I brought her completely through standard pipelines as well as my own custom pipelines. Our game was in Unity, but a lot of the motion capture work was done through Vicon Shogun Post, Motion Builder, and Unreal engine. I had to establish a pipeline to combine body and facial data onto the same track, and then get it from Unreal into Unity. If you'd like to learn more about the motion capture work done for S.T.E.L.A Check out my 2024 DEMO REEL On my page!
As for the design aspects of S.T.E.L.A., I wanted her to reflect the style of the early 70's and feel friendly, bubbly, and fun! In order to complete her model, I brought her through quite a few programs, but the real challenge was with optimization. We were developing for the Oculus Quest 2(VR Headset), so we had to make sure our models were as efficient as can be. S.T.E.L.A.'s original sculpt was over 2 million faces, which I was able to retopologize and get down to the recommended 36,000 for VR games, all while ensuring she would still deform properly when it came time to animate her.
Developing STARSHOT and S.T.E.L.A has been so much fun, and I'm so grateful for the experience as a whole. Shout out to everyone on the team for making STARSHOT the amazing game that it is. I look foreword to bringing the skills I've learned here into the workforce with me :)
Feel free to check out our games trailer here: https://youtu.be/kcqHd5cxdkY
Thank you for reading!