Sign up now to get early access to the next generation tools coming to Ready Player Me later this year, featuring support for custom character styles, an advanced node-based editor, and everything else you need to create your own character customization system.
Since launching Ready Player Me four years ago, we’ve grown to over 25,000 developers — including names like Lenovo and Ubisoft – creating amazing apps and games. Based on your feedback, we’ve added essential features like full-body avatars, the Avatar API, and custom and modular outfits.
We are always looking for improvements that would make Ready Player Me an even better avatar system for apps and games. Over those years, we have collected feedback from developers on supporting custom character styles, improving the skinning and rigging process, adding more advanced content tools, and more. Here’s where it brought us.
Small studios’ biggest challenges
Many small- and medium-sized game studios we talked to struggle with resource constraints. For teams with strapped art resources, that often means sacrificing the diversity and quality of assets. In the case of avatars, that can mean limited customization options for users. An art team’s work also includes somewhat mundane tasks of skinning and rigging avatars.
One solution is outsourcing to an external agency, which is often out of reach for studios with a limited budget.
The next generation of Ready Player Me tools
Based on the feedback we have been collecting from developers in the Ready Player Me network and external studios, we have set out to create the next generation of tools. Our goal was simple – enable anyone to build their character customization system, regardless of the characters and content they wish to use. Here’s your first look at what we built.
Use any characters
Until now, our custom content tools only supported Ready Player Me avatars with their skeleton. That's no longer the case with our next generation tool. You can use any character model with a custom skeleton. It’s as simple as drag-and-dropping the 3D model to the new version of our Developer Studio.
Of course, you can pick from existing character styles designed by our art team. Ready Player Me avatars will be supported, too. We will share more details later this year, so stay tuned.
Use any content
What makes our next-generation tools stand out is the new content editor. Like our existing Asset Manager tool, you can upload your custom avatar outfits or design textures for content from our assets library.
The new tool will offer a wider range of assets out of the box – from outfits created by our team to branded content. The node-based editor UI will give you complete creative freedom to adapt those assets to your characters and match them to your desired style. You can, for example, merge individual assets into a full-body outfit, generate new textures with AI, or even transfer the texture's style from a reference picture.
We designed our next generation tools to work with your art team’s existing workflow and preferred 3D software like Blender and Maya. For example, different AI nodes can be used to generate new textures from scratch or create style variations of your existing textures.
One of the highlight features of the new toolset is automatic content morphing. This makes it possible to morph any 3D asset onto any character model, including your custom ones. This saves hundreds of artist’s hours by significantly easing the process of repurposing assets across characters. It also allows loading assets from the Ready Player Me assets library onto your own custom character models. This is key for enabling content interoperability across various styles of characters that games use.
The tools also introduce an auto-rigging workflow, allowing assets uploaded to the platform to be automatically skinned to either our template skeleton or your custom one.
The new content editor isn't limited to our existing categories of customization options. This means that, besides shirts, hats, shoes, etc., you can also create custom asset types. It can be anything from accessories and armor pieces to weapons.
Besides creating content yourself, you will be able to give your users a chance to contribute their designs. Our new user-generated content tool (UGC) lets you create a shareable link and have your community craft their avatar assets. You and your team will have to review the submissions before making it to the live app or game. You can try the UGC tool today here.
Build your own character customization system
What brings all of it together is the ability to create a complete player-facing character customization system. Our Unreal and Unity SDKs provide a wrapper for the API endpoints, making it possible to build a custom character creation experience, as well as download and equip 3D assets and characters at runtime.
Functionality exposed in the next generation SDKs, API, and range of sample scenes can help you build things like:
- An end-to-end character customization system
- A powerful inventory system
- In-game collectables and wearables
We will dive deeper into the SDKs in a separate article.
Get early access to the next generation tools
Our next generation tools are already being used by a few selected studios whose games are launching later this year. To apply for early access and learn more about the next generation tools, click here.
We opened a new thread on the Developer Forums where you can discuss the next-gen tools and get more insights from our team.