Key Concepts for 3D Characters
Key Concepts for 3D Characters
Before you make a character, it helps to know a few basics. Don’t worry—you don’t need to be an expert! These ideas will just give you the vocabulary to follow the steps later.
Vertices (The Dots)
A vertex (plural: vertices) is a single point in 3D space.
Imagine pinning down corners on a piece of fabric—those pins are like vertices.
Vertices are connected to form edges (lines), and edges combine to make faces (triangles).
A mesh is made of thousands of these little triangles.
More vertices = more detail, but also a heavier file.
👉 You can think of vertices as the “atoms” of a 3D character—everything is built from them.
Mesh (The Skin)
A mesh is the 3D shape of your character. Think of it as the “skin” made of many small triangles stitched together.
The mesh defines what your character looks like on the outside.
High-polygon meshes (lots of vertices) look smoother, but can be heavy and slow to load.
Lower-polygon meshes (fewer vertices) load faster, but may look blockier.
For games, we want a balance: lightweight but still nice-looking.
Skeleton (The Bones)
The skeleton, sometimes called an armature or rig, is a hidden set of bones inside your mesh.
Just like real bones, these control how your character moves.
When the skeleton moves, the mesh moves with it.
Without a skeleton, your character is a statue that can’t animate.
Weighting (Skinning)
Weighting (or skinning) tells the computer which parts of the mesh follow which bones.
For example: your hand mesh should follow the hand bone, but not the foot bone.
Weights are often painted in colors (blue = no influence, red = full influence).
This ensures smooth bending—like your elbow flexing without breaking the arm mesh.
Textures & Materials (The Paint and Clothing)
A texture is a 2D image (like a picture) wrapped around the mesh, giving it color, details, or patterns.
A material tells the game how the texture should look—shiny, matte, transparent, etc.
Example: The texture is the “jeans fabric image,” while the material makes it look like real denim.
GLTF / GLB (The Package)
GLTF is a standard file format for sharing 3D models.
GLB is the “binary” version—everything (mesh, skeleton, textures, animations) is bundled into one file.
Think of GLB as a zip file for your character, ready for upload.
MML (The Description)
MML stands for Metaversal Markup Language. It's like an HTML file but instead of a website it is a 3D object or scene
Tips for Success
Here are some things to keep in mind as you build your avatar. Following these guidelines will save time and help your character look great once it’s in Otherside.
1. Character Proportions
Animations in Otherside are built for humanoid characters (like Apes or Voyagers).
👉 If proportions are too far from human, animations may look strange.
Example: If your character’s arms reach the ground, a clapping animation will look broken.
Guidelines for best results:
Overall height must be between 1 meter and 2 meters.
Head, body, and limb sizes should be similar to human proportions.
Stylized designs (bigger heads, slightly shorter legs) are fine, as long as the character still feels humanoid.
⚠️ Note: For characters like Kodas, Yuga created a custom animation set to match their proportions. Custom animations are not available for other collections, so sticking to humanoid shapes is key.
2. Avoid Transparency
Transparent objects are difficult to support and may not display correctly in all situations.
If possible, design around transparency instead of relying on it.
Features like glowing, metallic, or opaque materials are much easier to implement reliably.
👉 You’ll have a smoother experience if you avoid transparency altogether.
3. Work End-to-End and Iterate
Building an avatar has many steps, and each character can present unique challenges.
A great strategy is to:
Start simple (a rough block out).
Get it running in Otherside as soon as possible.
Refine and improve in small steps.
This way you’re always testing your work in context, and you won’t waste time polishing something that doesn’t export or animate correctly.
👉 By focusing on proportions, smart material choices, and iterative testing, you’ll give yourself the best chance of success.
1. Rough Block Out
Start by building a basic silhouette of your avatar and attaching it to a skeleton.
This doesn’t need to be fancy—simple shapes like cubes and spheres are enough.
Weighting is easy here: you can assign each shape’s vertices to a single bone.
Export this rough version early to check:
Proportions (does it look human-like enough for animations to work?)
Skeleton setup
Scale and export settings
👉 Spend time here adjusting proportions until it feels right. It’s much faster to test and tweak now than later.
2. Material Testing
If you plan to use special materials—like metallic surfaces, glowing parts, or transparency—test them on your block out first.
This gives you a quick preview of how these materials behave in-game and helps you decide how to build the final look.
3. Asset Planning
Use the information from your block out and material tests to plan your actual assets.
Single avatar: Prepare reference images and refine your block out into the real design.
Avatar collection: Decide how traits will fit together (hair, clothing, accessories, etc.) and collect references for each piece.
Good planning here saves a lot of time later in production.
4. Pipeline Planning
If you’re creating a collection, think about how traits will be combined into GLBs.
A good starting point: keep all the traits inside a Blender project.
Use Blender’s built-in Python scripting to export specific trait combinations into GLBs, guided by your metadata.
This step ensures your process can scale smoothly from one avatar to many.
5. Asset Production
Now it’s time to create the real content.
Model and sculpt your meshes.
Bind (weight) them to the skeleton.
Create and apply textures.
If you’re just making a single avatar, all of this can happen directly in Blender. For larger projects, you may use a more complex pipeline, but the goal is the same: by the end of this step, you’ll have meshes skinned to the skeleton and textures ready for export.
6. QA (Quality Assurance)
Always test your avatars before release in an Otherside/ODK map.
Check weighting (do joints bend smoothly?).
Test animations (does the character walk, run, and emote correctly?).
Verify materials (are they displaying as expected?).
At Yuga, we use an internal testing map where multiple models can be loaded with different animations applied. This helps us quickly spot issues and fix them before launch.
👉 Following this process will help you avoid surprises later and give you confidence that your avatar is ready to shine in Otherside.
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