Cartoon Character Maker - A Customizable Avatar Builder
Description
Inspired by the Nintendo Wii's "Mii", this thing is a 3D character maker - it allows the user to choose different facial features, hair, etc to make a custom 3D avatar.
Hyper-realistic 3D scans are becoming more commonplace, and this is not an effort to compete - think of this more as the cartoon version of yourself, or make up a character altogether!
Instructions
-Facial hair! Now you can choose from a full beard, chin strap, goatee, stache, chops, or a soul patch.
-Eyebrows! Models without glasses no longer have to leave the eyes all alone and unexpressive.
-Custom hair length! You an now adjust the hair length for some hair styles at will
-Dualstrusion! If you have a 2-color printer, you can now create models with hair, facial hair, glasses, and eyebrows in an alternate color. NOTE: This is a little buggy/experimental, so I'm posting a child to this design with dualstrusion contained. This model does not contain dualstrusion.
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First of all, this is a complex model and performance is an issue - please try to only make one change at a time, as Customizer gets a little confused if you change multiple things at a time.
Please note that this thing is a work in progress - I've been working on it for a while, but if there's sufficient interest, I'll keep refining and would love some collaboration from the community! Outside of modifications, future improvements include new features in all categories as well as new categories like hats, accessories, and facial hair.
Instruction:
1. To make your custom character, start by making sure the resolution is set low - 5 to 8 - to improve rendering time.
2. With resolution set low, just work your way through each of the selections, starting with head shape and moving into the facial features.
3. You don't need to change the more advanced features towards the bottom, like sizes and placement of each feature, but you can use these to fine tune your model.
4. Once you're happy with your character, adjust the head tilt to make your model printable. I've had the best success with a 40 degree tilt to minimize overhang, but have had successful prints at lower angles like 20.
5. Lastly, increase the resolution to 15 - 25 and wait until the final rendering is complete. Save the STL and get to printing!
Thanks to Tony Buser for his valuable advices.
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Excellent thing!!!!! To use it in a Lip-sync test would be very useful to be able to change only the mouth (interchangeable) using different types. the idea is matching lip movements with sung or spoken vocals changing only the mouth part...I guess, it would be possible?
My only request is for boy long hair. The long hair makes me look like I just came out of a beauty parlor! All the other Miis are going to laugh at me. I can never go bowling with them again :'(
Though I am not that fond of avatars, I have to say that this is a must!!
It should really finish in the short list for the customizer challenge imho :)
This is very cool!
Some requests:
- Beard, mustache. Lots of parameters.
- Hair more parametric. For example, once you pick the basic shape, the size and position could be parameters.
- Add a neck (a cylinder is fine) so it's printable without support.
Thanks for the feedback - esp re: parametric. Under the covers, there are far more parameters available, but I've limited here to make it more user friendly, especially for the less technical folks out there... maybe I can make an 'advanced' version or a nicer UI vis a vis some of the work Benjamin's been doing.
On the neck point - are you not getting a neck? There should be one for exactly that reason, but maybe I have a bug in the latest version...
Wow, this is pretty excellent! I just wish there was some facial hair options. :)
License
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This thing is great! I would love to see future additions to this. I had a blast changing the settings in this. Great work!
Thanks mikeq! I haven't had the time to work on this much lately (the new features are actually pretty time consuming, especially the customizable ones, since they're based on openSCAD geometry rather than imported point clouds, etc), but definitely intend to modify over time.
If you have any specific features in mind, let me know!