VR Barbershop Character | Art Test

A stylised client character for a mobile VR barbershop sim, made for a studio art test. The brief: the customer walks in, sits in the barber's chair, leans back, and their hair bursts into flames, all in an unlit art style for a young audience.

I started with a PureRef board mixing AI-generated concepts from ChatGPT with real-world reference, then took the design from there. He's a Gen Z teen glued to his phone, with a broccoli haircut, oversized hoodie and baggy jeans, so the silhouette reads instantly in VR and the hair fire lands as the punchline. I adapted one of my own low-poly base meshes, sculpted and retopologised a new head, and modelled the hair, clothing, barber chair and shop. Texturing uses small 256px colour palettes, with gradients doing the shading instead of scene lighting.

In Unity 6 I built separate unlit Shader Graph shaders for skin, clothing and hair (with adjustable colours and a burn-away effect on the hair), a VFX Graph fire and smoke effect, and a scripted sequence that walks the character to the chair and triggers each stage (the first draft of the script was written with Claude, then refined until it behaved as intended). Rigging used Mixamo and AccuRIG, with library animation cleaned up and adjusted by hand. The character is about 13k triangles, and the scene runs at 74 batches.

Completed in seven days, with a design document and a daily development log.

Tools: Blender, Unity 6 (Shader Graph, VFX Graph), Mixamo, AccuRIG, Rokoko, Photoshop, PureRef, ChatGPT, Claude.