A forest sloth character model and player avatar that I designed, modeled, and rigged for an unfinished VR game called “Big & Little”:

In this two-player asymmetric adventure game, players embody two unlikely allies of vastly different sizes who team up to solve puzzles and escape a fantastical realm using their complementary abilities.

Sculpted and modeled the sloth and clothes in Blender, textured in InstaMAT, and rigged using Blender and Rigify.

Rigging the clothes

Rigging the sloth’s clothing (cape, belts, wristbands, hood with feathers) to properly deform with the mesh underneath was quite a challenge!

When I just applied automatic weights, the clothes warped unevenly and clipped through the skin (especially around joints). Parts of the hood stretched away from each other since they were weighted to different bones.

I experimented with a couple options but what ended up working best was using a modifier to directly project bone weights from the skin onto the the thin cloth parts, with some manual touch ups in the more bendy areas. The hood was a special case and blends from projected weights at the bottom to being fully weighted to the sloth’s head bones at the top.

But the objects attached to the clothing (the feathers and keys) still didn’t look good — they still moved around separately from the cloth they were attached to. A second pass of projecting weights from the nearest cloth vertex onto each object finally fixed these.

Game design

This “little” player has running and climbing abilities and can collect items around each level to store on its person for later use. This druid sloth is the agile one, breaking the usual stereotypes.

Asymmetric player mechanics reinforce the relative scales of the players (the big player is 5x the size of the smaller!) and encourage physical interactions between them. This experience of embodied scale is only possible in VR and furthers the game’s player experience goal of deepening the relationship between two people by exploring power dynamics through play, with specific focus on how those dynamics affect interactions between the two players and emotional changes when those dynamics are swapped.