Facebook/Meta Avatars
Avatars in Facebook were created to allow people to express themselves in a new more personalized way. This system needed to be scalable and diverse enough to support the 2.5 billion people using the app around the world.
My impact on this project:
Proactively building the initial prototype to present to leadership, gaining approval.
Designing, building and overseeing construction of the artist’s pipeline for creating avatar and expressive content.
Building and managing a team of TAs and Artists.
Avatar Pipeline
Facebook Avatars required a pipeline that could equally represent a diverse population including hair types, skin tones, and body shapes.
I designed a 2.5D paper doll system that utilized server side rendering to improve performance, security and scalability. Each avatar category had a set of cards that were swapped based on the person’s selection. These cards were connected to a 3D rig that artists could use for posing expressive content.
Expression Pipeline
This system needed to be a robust, scalable, and stable platform for internal artists and vendors to create content across multiple platforms. The output supported an assortment of resolutions and aspect ratios for different product needs.
I built this system using Maya and Photoshop as the primary creative platforms, utilizing a series of scripts and templates to provide content creators with clear layouts and accurate expected results. The pipeline would output a package for uploading into our backend tooling for versioning and release.
Avatar Emojis
Utilizing the avatar pipeline we were able to rapidly develop Avatar Emojis for use in Live, Stories, and “How are you feeling” features on Facebook.
Through collaboration with the art and engineering teams supporting this new design language, I created a new 2d pipeline that utilized our existing rendering engine. This accelerated our production timeline, which was a launch requirement. As a fun bonus, I was named on patent US-11962860-B1 for this feature.
Meta Avatars
Prioritizing VR and Metaverse integration, a new 3D avatar style was developed and launched.
I lead the technical support for the art, animation, lighting, and marketing teams who were creating content for Instagram, Messenger, Facebook, VR, and Horizon App. My primary responsibilities were maintaining the pipeline, creating execution plans, and building new feature pipelines.
