A Meta employee recently posted a bizarre story on LinkedIn about how he created Mark Zuckerberg’s new avatar.

3D character artist for Meta, Dylan Dunbar, recently posted on LinkedIn about his recreation of Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar. Apparently, it took Dunbar and art director Steve Rheinfrank around four weeks and 40 different iterations to land on a fitting avatar for Zuckerberg.

The LinkedIn post is now deleted but while it lasted it spawned a host of jokes about the whole scenario. Many critiqued that the amount of work put into the model was higher than it needed to be because Zuckerberg is overly concerned with his image and his last avatar was received horribly.

@MattNavara on Twitter shared the story and a screenshot of the deleted post, which he theorizes was likely removed at the command of Meta.

“A Meta employee who created Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar revealed the backstory on LinkedIn.

Apparently, it took 4 weeks and 40 iterations to create the new Zuck avatar.

Meta clearly didn’t like him leaking this info. The post has been deleted!”

“I don’t usually post on linkedin, but for this I have to. I’m new to Meta and created Mark Zuckerberg avatar from scratch- sculpted, modeled, lit, textured, and rendered in real time in a little under 4 weeks, with art direction from Steve Rheinfrank. We went through probably 40 iterations in that time before landing on something we were happy with. Mark liked it enough to post it! Could not be more stoked.”

Zuckerberg’s last avatar was mocked endlessly after the Meta CEO posted a VR selfie with a VR Eifell Tower in the background.

People jumped on it hard, to the point that an entire rework of the avatar was required.

“Mark Zuckerberg launches Horizon Worlds in France and Spain with an eye-gougingly ugly VR selfie. Meta’s metaverse ploy is surely dying in the dark.”

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