Interview with Fins: Part 1
Part of the "VR is Alive" Artist Spotlight Series
For this interview we are fortunate to have Fins (he/him) joining us to chat about his creative process and advice. Fins joins us from VRChat, where he specializes in building some amazingly detailed worlds in social VR!
Feel free to watch the shorter video if you have less time, or watch the full video to get to know more about Fins.
: Please introduce yourself with your pronouns and what you want the audience to know about you first.
Fins: Of course, thank you for having me. Hello, my name is Fins. I go by he/him and I'm a 3D artist working at VRChat. I'm also a world creator for the past six years on VRChat, creating various experiences from cozy worlds to adventures to just about anything.
Can you explain your name and as well as your avatar and where they both come from?
So I have a weird fascination with fish, marine life, but sharks in particular. I'm not that sure why. It's probably like a childhood thing, you know. Everyone has their own favorite animals and mine happened to be fish when I was a little kid. Whenever I have an online account or anything like that, I usually go by Fins. Black Fins, red Fins, blue Fins, something like that. And on VRChat, I usually go by Fins. There's no colors on it. Fins, like on top of the sharks. And the avatar used to be a little shark girl but eventually it's kind of evolved into this...I would say Alice in Wonderland theme. There's something I really like about the whole thing from the book where, you know, you can be taken to a different place, a different world, where it's just you exploring a different reality. That's kind of like what VR is for, right? The whole thing about, you know, making worlds and exploring different reality. It's almost like being inside Alice in Wonderland. And I feel like this avatar fits the theme a little bit. That's where the whole aesthetic came from.
Can you tell me about your introduction to and your earliest memory of social VR?
Social apps are nothing new to me. I have a long history of playing MMORPGs, World of Warcraft, RuneScape... I spent many years playing all kinds of social games. Even Second Life. I spent probably three years on that but when VRChat came around, it was like a new big thing. I was already very interested in VR at the time, but I couldn't afford it. So I would just watch videos about VR in general, not social VR in particular, just VR. Then that kind of YouTube recommendation pushed me into this VRChat thing. I would start looking at it, I think around 2017. I also had the Gear VR around the time I discovered VRChat. They were a type of social VR, but I guess they didn't take off. I was introduced to VRChat thanks to a YouTuber called Jameskii, he was making all these videos about VRChat in a nutshell. I think that was the time where VRChat started to explode in popularity. So yeah, that probably was my introduction to it. I thought, wow, this is kind of fun looking, even though it's kind of chaotic. I didn't have a VR headset yet, but the fact that anybody even with a desktop can get into that and enjoy...I think that was the biggest draw for me. Because I know some day when you get a VR headset, you can just continue enjoying the intended experience.
Do you have a first world you remember that comes to mind?
First world? I would say The Great Pug. It's just like a lot of other people. The Great Pug was where you saw what's happening on the YouTube videos and as the new user, you're trying to find, you know, other people. So when I jump into the platform for the first time, and I'm like, where are all the people? The top on the list was the Great Pug with the most players inside. So naturally, I've tried to find the biggest instance I can get into. My first account for VRChat wasn't this account, it was a different account. It was named A Cat, so I uploaded like a really, really like basic cat model with like no animation or nothing. It was a static cat animation, a tiny little cat. And I went to the Great Pug and people was like, "Hey, there's a little cat" and they start petting me and stuff. That was my shy way of interacting because I wasn't used to the community. I wasn't used to how things are. I was trying to like, get a feel for the platform, so I didn't say anything. I didn't speak at all. I'm just like a static cat model floating around the Great Pug trying to hear people's conversation. That was my very first couple of days.
When did you start making worlds or things for social VR in general? What inspired you to start on this journey to making worlds for people to enjoy like this one?
I love creating just about anything. When I was younger, in middle school, I played a lot of games like Rollercoaster Tycoon, Mall Tycoon, anything that. You know, that let you create something even though it's not like completely a flash out screen. One of my first favorite game I was introduced to when I moved to the United States was The Sims 1, the very first one. I didn't care too much about the actual gameplay, the hunger or the happiness meter or anything like that. I actually only enjoyed creating the house and the park and the place that people go to in The Sims. And I got The Sims 2 and I continued to make houses for my cousins. Later on, you know, Minecraft and any other game like, let's see, I think it was Starcraft? Yeah, Starcraft 2 and just make maps for the community and all of that.
I just had a history of just creating anything and sharing it. That was the whole inspiration, especially when I saw VRChat on YouTube and I kind of looked more into it. The fact that a lot of the stuff you see in VRChat is user created content, which at the time the only other platform that did that socially was, I think, Second Life. But Second Life comes with a really high barrier of entry because to have a plot of land to build something on, you need money, a lot of money. You need to rent land. You need to buy stuff, like buy houses. So even though there is some level of creative freedom, it's still really not meant for anybody to create. The fact that VRChat lets you create from the get-go is a huge, major draw for me. Especially when it's run on a dedicated game engine like Unity, which means there's no limitation....well there's some limitation, but not on the level of Second Life.
So the possibilities were endless, and that's what drew me into VRChat a lot. The first world I created was probably a month after I played for the first time, because at first I just want to feel, you know, the whole game to get used to it a little bit more socially. I've told this story many times and my closest friends know about it. I went to the world called Archery by CyanLaser. I didn't know him at the time, but in Archery I picked up this little flyer on the ground that said, "Why not create your first world and show it off at the community meetup?” Or something like that. I think it was either a contest or community meetup. I don't particularly remember. It was the flyer that encouraged you to create your world. I'm like, yeah, I should finally start looking into this.
That's when I made my first world. It took me, I think, like a couple of weeks, but it was a little cafe called Shark's Fin Cafe. At the time, one of the requests I heard a lot from people on Reddit and stuff was: Is there a rain world that we can go to? Does anybody know a world with raining? Which is really funny because now any world, if you open the menu of VRChat and you go to the list, it's like 80% of the chill worlds are rainy or have some level of rain. But back then, it didn't exist. Not that I know of. So I made the cafe and I made it rainy and made, you know, the whole glass with the condensation and the rain dripping down. That didn't exist back then. And we had to pull a shader from shadertoy.com to try to convert it into VRChat and use it. But it wasn't great. It looked pretty weird. But that was the first instance of a cozy world with rain and rainy shaders on the glass. And now you kind of see it everywhere.
You can read Part 2 of our interview with Fins tomorrow!