me.

Blake Senftner

Computer Scientist | MBA | Digital Artist

Blender 3D Avatar AddOn

 

24 body forms: normal to heavy to muscular to thin across two genders and three ethnicities are the shape/morph target basis of the custom 3D Avatar creation AddOn

Spring of '22 I noticed that Blender has become quite the fantastic comprehensive 3D Everything.

Specifically, Blender's Geometry Nodes subsystem has come of age, elevating the entire Blender ecosystem to rival non-free and open source packages such as Maya3DStudio Max, and Houdini. A good friend's startup needed some help, so I helped by writing a custom Blender 3D Avatar Generator AddOn, plus more help with some software developer and project management.

I designed and wrote a two component Custom 3D Avatar Creation System:

  1. A Blender AddOn for creating Custom 3D Avatar body forms. The image at the top of this post shows the available range of avatar body forms:
    1. Male or Female or any percentage between
    2. Asian or African or Caucasian or any 3-way percentage between
    3. Average build or muscular or obese or skinny or any percentage between
    4. Over 130 face/head shape/morph targets covering a deluxe range of:
      1. face/head shape adjustments,
      2. face expressions, including eye brows, as well as smile and worry lines
      3. extensive lip sync and tongue shape controls
  2. I negotiated business partnership with Keen Tools, producers of the Blender Face Builder AddOn, for internal integrated automation use.
    1. Integrated with an internal REST server controlling both Face Builder and my 3D Avatar Body Form Generator AddOns.

Together these two components form the basis of a new photo realistic custom 3D Avatar creation system for my good friend's startup INTRACT, and an additional line of business.

I've been playing  around with exposing this with a web interface, as a toy: check out that work in progress. (Note: large download, over 110MB. It is a work in progress.)

Here's a full body avatar with an African face, a Mixamo motion capture "swimming" animation, and my face rig used to animate a worried expression:

If the video is not playing, are you using Google Chrome? Google is mucking about with their ads API, trying to defeat ad blockers, and it appears to affecting my playing of video in their browsers. 

tags: Blender