For this contract, I created a rigged avatar for the social casual VR game Balloon Bats. In the game, players are bats who soar, socialize, and collect balloons spread across a ship and floating islands. Barry the Bat became the game’s mascot.

The goal was to create an expressive avatar that combined realistic fruit bat features with a cartoony style to establish the game’s brand.

Process

The project progressed through several phases: establishing a shared vision for the bat’s visual design, developing a technical proposal, creating the 3D character model, and integrating the rig into the Unity project.

The client and I used a generative AI concept art tool and shared reference board to iterate quickly on visual direction.

Some requirements from the proposal:

• The model needed multiple attachment points and visual customization options to support future skins and in-game items
• The wingspan and body proportions needed to match human VR player proportions while also maintaining a realistic bat silhouette
• Max 5k triangles and 2 materials/texture lookups to match the game’s performance budget
• Support for multiple movement modes (flying, standing)
• Include a jaw flap bone for lipsync

Avatar rig

Since this is a VR player avatar, the rig uses only the player’s head and controller as controls, deriving the rest of the pose from these three transforms. I implemented the avatar using Unity’s Animation Rigging package, with different rig setups for each movement mode that are blended when transitioning modes. The body follows the head position using an offset, the arms use IK, and wing surfaces follow a plane between the shoulders and hands.

The animation controller blends between authored wing poses (folded and unfolded) and grip animations based on player input.

The wings use a separate material so that assets for in-game cosmetics can be easily mapped onto the wings and swapped out.

Play Balloon Bats for free on Meta Quest!