Hairstyle

Create custom hairstyles for Ready Player Me avatars.

This document explains how to create an avatar hairstyle that meets Ready Player Me technical specifications and functions properly in your application.

Example hairstyle in Blender

1. Create your hairstyle

• Download the hair template Blender project. The template project contains a reference head model and a hairstyle.
• Your asset must fit the head-template (Download Head Template)
• Use Blender to open the hair_demo.blend.

• Create a hairstyle as a single object. It should fit the provided head model reference in the hair_demo.blend template project. -> Check out modeling guidelines

Technical requirements

• Triangle count: max. 5000

• Object name: Wolf3D_Hair

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Hair

• Material name: Wolf3D_Hair

• Basecolor map: No (Hair color is changed by the user)

• Normal map: Optional OpenGL tangent space normal map, +Y up.

• Metallic-Roughness map: Optional

• Occlusion map: Optional We recommend to pack the occlusion map into the red-channel of the metallicRoughnessTexture. See Blender documentation on how to export it.
• Emissive map: Optional

• Texture Resolution: max. 2048 x 2048 pixels Texture resolutions must be square and power-of-two, e.g. 128x128, 256x256, 512x512.

• Texture files format: PNG/JPEG PNG with 24 bits per pixel. Do not use palettes (8-bit color indexed). Do not include metadata or color profile information in the image files to avoid errors.

• Individual texture file size: max. 4 MB

• Vertex colors: No

• Skin weights: Optional No more than 4 influences per vertex. Weights must be normalized.

• Set object, mesh data, and material names in Blender according to the Technical requirements.

  
• Check that the object does not have any vertex colors.

• Check that object location, rotation and scale have been applied. In Blender you can do that by selecting the hair object and going to the 3D view's menu Object -> Apply -> All Transforms.

Asset Limitations

Be aware that hair meshes will pass through other meshes of the avatar, e.g. body or the torso garment, during animation and not react physically accurate (or at all) to colliding geometry. Short hair styles are better for hiding this effect.

Materials & Texture Maps

• Asset uses Principled BSDF (PBR) material in Blender.

• Enable Backface Culling.

• Material does not have a basecolor map. Leave Principled BSDF Base Color empty. For a Ready Player Me avatar, the color of the hair is chosen by the user, so any basecolor map would be discarded.

• Notice that the Color Space for Normal Map image texture is set to Non-Color.

hair_demo.glb shows a correct Principled BSDF material setup in Blender for hair, including a normal map.

2. Export the asset

• Export the hair model into glTF Binary(.glb). Below are the required export settings using Blender.

• Only include the hair model in the export, not the reference head model.

Starting with Blender 4, objects placed in a glTF_not_exported collection are excluded from the export.

Export Settings in Blender

Do not use custom glTF-Extensions extensions in the file, e.g. Draco mesh compression.

3. Upload and validate your asset

File Requirements

• File type: .GLB

• File Size: max. 10 MB

• Icon file size: max. 1 MB

Ready Player Me Studio

Using the Ready Player Me Studio interface, you can navigate to the Asset Manager, and then choose Add new asset, or directly go to https://studio.readyplayer.me/asset-management/new.

In the Type selection, you must select Hair as the asset type.

In the Gender selection, choose Neutral to make them available to all stereotypes.

Upload the necessary files and Save. The asset is only saved when it passes validation. If any errors are detected regarding the compliance with the requirements, you'll get a notification and more information.

API

When you want to push your assets to your organization at Ready Player Me, use thePOST - Create AssetAPI endpoint with the data.type set to hair. Once the asset is created, the files will be stored by Ready Player Me.

If you don't have the files yet available at a public URL for use with the Create Asset API endpoint, you can use the temporary storage solution provided by us via the POST - Upload Asset Filesendpoint.

Once the export is complete, open Ready Player Me Studio (Asset Manager) and upload your creation. The asset will be validated on upload. Learn more Asset Manager in Studio.