A-Frame mascot

[dmarcos]

Just because there's never enough whimsy 😄 cc @kfarr

[kfarr]

A quick mood board with some examples

Elmo

Who doesn't love Elmo?

Clarence

On the more sarcastic / dark humor side https://wondershowzen.fandom.com/wiki/Chauncey or https://wondershowzen.fandom.com/wiki/Clarence https://archive.org/details/wondershowzen/Wonder+Showzen+S1E01+Birth.avi

Pickle Rick

Also dark humor / sarcastic

[dmarcos]

A more friendly version of bender :)

[dmarcos]

Fraggle rock doozers

[koktavy]

I see your Elmo and I raise you Yip Yips

[kfarr]

Here are some mashups of the above from dreamstudio / stable diffusion. I chose the best of a bunch of different rounds. Do any of these seem like a character worth building on? We can also engage a character designer to help sketch out some ideas.

[dmarcos]

Like this very much:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itiNt5PUuxg&ab_channel=DannyHuynhCreations

Recycled robot made with a mash up of spare parts of other robots. Captures Web spirit :)

[kfarr]

Ok we had 2 spinoffs that aren't actually the official "A-Frame mascot" as this ticket entitled, so providing visibility on how to track their progress:

• simple puppet rigging experiment - originally pickle rick, but he is transitioning to cucumber carl -> track here: https://github.com/3DStreet/3dstreet-assets-source/issues/74
• dadbot v1 - potential character for a silly ai experiment -> track here: https://github.com/3DStreet/3dstreet-assets-source/issues/75

No need to rush the official mascot, I think that as we play with some of these ideas and early rigging some more ideas will emerge!

[koktavy]

I dig dadbot.

Has the mascot idea been brought up on twitter/discord/other socials? An A-Frame Request for Comment (ARC) could stir up some additional input.

[Minty-Crisp]

I love this idea! Gonna work on some mascot designs asap. I think this would also be an excellent community jam idea as well. Maybe we could make a base avatar glitch scene and let people go wild.

[richardanaya]

@dmarcos

[Minty-Crisp]

A-Bot (Image Preview)

Here is my first mascot prototype A-Bot built out of shape primitives in A-Frame. I added a few basic eye expression animations that loop and some idle/arm waving to start for now. Check out the glitch preview of A-Bot here --> https://glitch.com/~mintycrisp-aframe-mascot-a-bot

The preview is temporarily using my own AUXL dependency just to make it easier for me to prototype, but I will gladly port any finished work to vanilla A-Frame as well as build a component to generate the mascot and control any animations. It's easy to export the full layout within inspector, then just gotta set up event emitters for the animations.

I personally think it would be best if we can build the mascot entirely within A-Frame (instead of an exported 3D asset) as it could be an interesting template for people learning to play with and customize their own version.

I'm currently playing with 3 main mascot ideas...

• a super simple head/face with only a handful of entities basically an emoticon
• a full body robot with articulating joints that could be used as a player avatar as well
• an entity layout that consists of 1 or 1+ of every single primitive (shapes, curved screen, torus knot, light, etc...) that could be used for reference and testing

No expectations on picking any of my subsequent prototypes, but if we come to a consensus about a specific design (from a 2D/3D asset) then I would happily attempt to rebuild that version with A-Frame shapes so it could be loaded without additional dependencies.

A-Bot (Video Preview) https://github.com/aframevr/aframe/assets/107079505/3c702db4-fc47-41b1-90d0-b01518e63459

[dmarcos]

Nice. Thanks. Love the creativity! Came across this https://x.com/KMkota0/status/1724458266518753725?s=20

Library not available yet but wonder if it can be used to add a nice secondary movement to a model: silly hair or antenna on a robot.

[dmarcos]

@thedart76 might like this convo

[thedart76]

My favourite is the dadbot. I love the design concept and the options @kfarr has worked on and shared here:

https://github.com/3DStreet/3dstreet-assets-source/issues/75

[Minty-Crisp]

Those library example are super slick! My laptop started sounding like a jet plane after a few seconds running it though ;). I applaud the developer on what they made, but they want ~6k $$$ before they start working on a public version. So I doubt we'll see this released unfortunately. We could do something similar though with a physics engine along with the use of constraints such as hinge or coneTwist as I've used in cannon.js.

I also think the dadbot is neat. I really like the metal body contrast with soft wool sweater as well as the silly mustache of course. I doubt I could make a primitive only version, but it could still easily be shared and remixed from a public blend file. With a blender rig, we could do fancy animations like that library had too. Imagine loading up aframe.io and seeing that dorky robot saying hello, would be pretty neat.

I played with some more style ideas as well. For a smaller / simpler bot, we could try something akin to the Destiny video game companions, Ghost, for which I did a small mockup for. We could also pick an animal shape/silhouette (even if still a robot) such as a rabbit to help make it clear in smaller icons/favicons as well. I updated my mascot glitch with those 2 mockups and basic animations you'll find here --> https://glitch.com/~mintycrisp-aframe-mascot-a-bot

Glitch Mascot Mockup Preview