With growing usage of social virtual worlds and spaces like VRChat and Mozilla Hubs, you might be looking for a way to make your own avatar to represent yourself in VR. Here are two user-friendly avatar character creator apps for that purpose which won’t require the use of developer-level tools like Unity, Blender, etc.
Updated – March 3rd, 2021
Ready Player Me
Compatible with VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, LIV, MeetinVR and More
The Ready Player Me avatar creator works on both desktop and mobile devices. Start by picking the Ready Player Me avatar maker for the app you’re targeting:
Make a Ready Player Me Avatar For:
VRChat | Mozilla Hubs | LIV | General Purpose (.glb) | General Purpose (.fbx)
You’ll first be prompted to take a selfie to form the foundation of your avatar (though you can optionally skip this step and start from scratch). From there you can define features like hair, eyebrows, eye color, glasses, and clothing. The number of options is fairly limited for now, but we hope to see them grow with time.
When you’re done making your own VR avatar, you’ll be shown a button or given instructions to import the avatar into the app you’ve selected, or you can download the avatar itself in .glb or .fbx depending upon which option you started with.
Tafi Avatars
Compatible with VRChat
With Tafi, you have control over your avatar’s body properties (like height, body shape, skin color, head shape, eye color, hairstyle, etc) as well as clothing and accessories (like shirts, pants, shoes, hats, tattoos, earrings, etc).
The app uses a ‘freemium’ model which allows you to pick from a range of free options, while many options are premium and paid with in-app currency. When you first make your Tafi account, you’ll be given 1,000 coins (enough to buy a premium hairstyle or article of clothing); if you want to buy more premium options you can purchase more starting at $2 per 1,060 coins.
When you’re done building your avatar in the Tafi creator, you can link the application to your VRChat account and then upload your newly created avatar directly to your account for use.
Tafi says that its avatars are automatically optimized to work on both the PC and Quest versions of VRChat; the avatars are also fully rigged for IK, mouth, and eye animation.
As far as we can see at this time, Tafi Avatar VRChat Edition doesn’t offer any kind of direct download or export of your avatar, which means your avatar is not currently portable or editable in other applications.
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It’s early days for the world of VR avatar creation, and if you aren’t willing to get your hands dirty with 3D modeling and animation tools, the options for easily creating your own for use in VR remain fairly slim.
In the future we hope to see more social VR apps support external avatars so that users have more options for defining what they look like in VR, and the ability to have a persistent virtual persona across VR applications.
Are there any other user-friendly tools out there which make avatars for use in VR? Let us know in the comments!