I’m Suraia, a self taught 3d artist. I started learning 3D with Blender years back when I was playing World of Warcraft and really wanted to make art with my character Suraia. But the more I did, the more I wanted to make my own things and not just kit bash stuff. So slowly I learned more and more about making my own model and learning more about Blender, setting up scenes, materials, lighting and that sort of stuff. Still I wanted more then just that so for a while I have been looking at Unity but the programming just wasn’t really my thing.
Fast forward to a few years back I discovered VRChat, a game where you could make your own avatars and worlds, but still in Unity. I started to explore things more and more and discovered Virtual Reality and immediately fell in love with it. I tried to get into avatar creation for VRChat using my own model but wasn’t really happy with the result. Still I learned a lot about setting up game characters, but also the limitations of VRChat and the established ecstatic there that thought I can understand is not really what I am looking for.
Eventually I made the leap to install Unreal Engine 5 and try that out. Even though I still consider myself a beginner when it comes to Unreal I really like the way they set up things and how the blueprints work. Every time I work in Unreal it just feels to me like this is what I want to do, what I want to learn more about and get better at. Luckily I discovered a game called Riff XR, a VR MMO made with Unreal Engine 5.3 that also has custom Avatars and worlds. While the game is still in development you can already play it through steam for free in early access mode. I feel incredibly lucky to have found this game when I did and want to learn more about how to get avatars and worlds working for the game. And while I am working on that I learn more and more about Unreal Engine, so it’s a win win.
I am married woman with two kids and two dogs. We live in The Netherlands. I have a part-time job and after all my chores for work and as a mom are done I can do things for myself. Mostly this will be working on VR stuff in Blender or Unreal Engine. My other hobbies include Larping and Mermaiding. I am just a huge fan of anything fantasy related really. Apart from that I am also autistic and introverted.
I understand my busy live and me being autistic and introverted can make things very challenging when it comes to doing things in VR. It’s a bit of contradiction when you want to create things for a social VR platform while you suffer from selective mutism online and are just generally very shy and awkward in an public online space where voice chat is the main means of communication. But this doesn’t mean I will give up on something I love, I am confident that with time I will find a way to navigate all of this and make it work somehow. If I don’t try I will have failed already and so long as I don’t give up there is still hope things will work out. I have faith they will.