Hero Characters

Create unique Hero Characters for your application.

A Hero Character is a complete avatar by any means. It includes all elements of a Ready Player Me avatar, including accessories, hair and body, for example.

Following these guidelines, you can provide a fully prepared custom avatar for the Ready Player Me platform.

Example Hero Characters can be downloaded here.

Take these files as a reference of a functional Hero Character.

The examples include blend shapes on the head mesh for facial animation support.

Check the documentation on morph targets.

Alternatively, you can create an avatar using a Ready Player Me Avatar Editor, and download it with certain options: ?textureAtlas=none&morphTargets=ARKit,Oculus Visemes

Hero Character Requirements

Armature

An Armature is a skeleton that is responsible for deforming the avatar during animation. It does so by a process called linear-blend skinning, for which each vertex on a mesh, aka skin, needs a set of weights that determine by which joint in the skeleton they are going to be influenced.

You can download fullbody templates here. Use the masculine or feminine skeleton.

Ready Player Me avatars have either a feminine or masculine shape, each based on separate skeletons. When creating an avatar, it must use either the feminine or masculine skeleton.

Do not include animations in the exported file.

Meshes & Materials

General Requirements for Meshes, Materials and Textures

Maximum total triangle count: 30000 You decide how to distribute triangles across meshes. We recommend to use as few triangles as feasible and put details into the texture maps.

Skin weights: Required for ALL meshes Implementations of the gltf 2.0 specs are only required to at least implement 4 skin weights per vertex. Therefore, Ready Player Me assets only support a maximum of 4 skin weights per vertex. Skin weights for each vertex MUST be normalized, meaning they have to add up to 1.0!

Vertex colors: No

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Texture files format: PNG|JPEG For PNG images, use 24 bits per pixel (RGB) or 32 bits per pixel (RGBA). Do not use palettes (8-bit color indexed). Do not include metadata or color profile information in the PNG image file to avoid errors.

BaseColor maps: Optional Use sRGB (IEC 61966-2-1 Default RGB color space) when editing the image.

The materials support transparency.

Use a PNG with transparency as the basecolor map and set the alphaMode to BLEND.

In Blender, you can do this in the material's settings with the Blend Mode option set to Alpha Blend.

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

Metallic-Roughness maps: Optional

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

Emissive maps: Optional

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

Maximum individual texture file size: 5 MB

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Double sided materials: Optional We recommend to use as few double sided materials as possible.

Not all of the following meshes are needed. Only include the meshes you need for the custom avatar you have in mind.

It is possible to only use a single mesh for the whole avatar with a single material. In that case we recommend using the Hero Characters mesh.

Head

The head of the avatar.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Head

• Material name: Wolf3D_Skin

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

The head mesh supports morph targets or facial animation. See documentation on morph targets.

Note that you have to provide a basecolor map for its material, because the users do not have the option to choose the skin color of hero characters. You're in full control.

EyeLeft

The left eye of the avatar.

Requirements

• Mesh name: EyeLeft

• Material name: Wolf3D_Eye

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

EyeRight

The right eye of the avatar.

Requirements

• Mesh name: EyeRight

• Material name: Wolf3D_Eye

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex Colors: No

Teeth

Teeth of the avatar.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Teeth

• Material name: Wolf3D_Teeth

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Body

The body of the avatar, except for the head.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Body

• Material name: Wolf3D_Body

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Note that you have to provide a basecolor map for its material, because the users do not have the option to choose the skin color of hero characters. You're in full control.

Hair

The hair of the avatar.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Hair

• Material name: Wolf3D_Hair

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Note that you have to provide a basecolor map for its material, because the users do not have the option to choose the hair color of hero characters. You're in full control.

Beard

The facial hair of the avatar.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Beard

• Material name: Wolf3D_Beard

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Note that you have to provide a basecolor map for its material, because the users do not have the option to choose the beard color of hero characters. You're in full control.

The beard mesh supports morph targets or facial animation. See documentation on morph targets.

Facewear

Assets that can cover parts of the face, like masks.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Facewear

• Material name: Wolf3D_Facewear

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Headwear

Assets to put on the avatar's head, like hats or helmets.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Headwear

• Material name: Wolf3D_Headwear

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Glasses

Assets that resemble any kind of glasses.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Glasses

• Material name: Wolf3D_Glasses

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Opacity map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Top

Clothing assets that cover the torso and arms, like shirts and jackets, also including necklace, gloves, backpacks, shoulder pads, or dresses.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Outfit_Top

• Material name: Wolf3D_Outfit_Top

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Bottom

Clothing asset that cover the legs, like pants or skirts, also including knee pads or a belt.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Outfit_Bottom

• Material name: Wolf3D_Outfit_Bottom

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Footwear

Clothing assets that cover the feet of an avatar, like shoes and boots, may include socks.

Requirements

• Mesh name: Wolf3D_Outfit_Footwear

• Material name: Wolf3D_Outfit_Footwear

• Basecolor map: Optional

• Normal map: Optional

• Roughness map: Optional

• Metallic map: Optional

• Emissive map: Optional

• Vertex colors: No

Uploading a Hero Character

File Requirements

• File type: .GLB

• File Size: max. 10 MB

• Icon file size: max. 1 MB

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

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 Hero Character as the asset type.

In the Gender selection, choose the option matching the skeleton you based your asset on.

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 costume. 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.