Overview

You can customize the look of your Avatar using Digital DNA Blender.

Digital DNA Blender allows you to design your own Digital Person that best represents your brand, client, or organization.

Preset Avatars

We provide a selection of Preset Avatars that you can use to get going quickly. Each one has been carefully crafted by our team of world-class artists and demonstrates the diversity of what can be created with our Digital DNA system.

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Customizing a preset

If you wish to customize a preset avatar, you will need a copy of its Digital DNA. This can be collected from the Digital DNA Bank. Once copied to your clipboard, open Digital DNA Blender, and locate the ••• icon in the top right, and choose “Load Digital DNA”. This will enable you to customise a copy of that avatar with Digital DNA Blender.

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Customizing Your Avatar

Modifying clothing

Digital DNA Blender offers a range of clothing options to meet your particular use-case or context. Choosing between a masculine or feminine body type will toggle a different wardrobe selection.

Pre-curated textures

There is an extensive library of textures/swatches available for each garment. Selecting a new garment will change the possible swatches. Some garments offer two aspects that can be colored separately (e.g., Blazer & Shirt combo shown below)

Custom Textures

You can customize the clothing texture yourself using our Photoshop template. You can add clothing patterns, colors, and company logos to create an original, branded garment.

Currently, we have templates for clothing options, and name badge. As part of the Photoshop template, you will find a PDF file containing practical instructions in Photoshop and the templates for the T-shirt types for both genders. Follow the instructions to design your custom clothing and use the Upload Texture option to upload the image.

Customizing the Background

The background for a Digital Person is customised via Digital DNA Blender and can either be a solid color or an image. Consider how your brand colors will incorporate across the appearance of your Digital Person and the UI colors. Transparency is not supported in WebRTC, the mechanism which delivers our Digital People into website deployments.

Solid Color

A solid color can be selected using the color picker UI or by entering a RGB, HSL, or HEX value.

Custom Image Background

Uploading a background image for your Digital People allows you to further customize the environment in which your digital creations exist, providing a more immersive and personalized experience. You can select to use a custom image for the background by downloading the custom image background template, customizing this within Photoshop, and uploading the exported image.

To create a custom background, download the linked Photoshop template file which will demonstrate the safe areas as it pertains to content and camera cuts.

The custom background image feature is hard-coded to only accept images of these sizes (H x W):

• 1024 x 2048px

• 2048 x 4096px

• 4096 x 8192px

Additionally, the image needs to be below 20MB.

Portrait Backgrounds:

To achieve a "portrait" look, the workflow is to create an 8K canvas in Photoshop or similar, then centre a portrait image in the centre of that canvas. Put a solid colour on the borders, like so:

You will need to configure your CustomUI viewport size to match the max-height which in the image above is 4096px. The width can be anything up to 8192, but to avoid showing the black borders should be the same as the 'image' part of the background, which in the example is 2922px.

Accessories

Name-tags

Many customers wish to enable their Digital Person to wear a name-tag. This can be added via the accessories tab. You can download the required Photoshop template and then upload the exported image to customize the name-tag.

Makeup

Digital People are created with a natural look. To enhance the appearance, you can use the makeup options Entertainment, Professional, and Retail with varied intensity based on the use case.

Hairstyle

Hairstyle is one of the most significant contributors to an Avatar’s silhouette, and can dramatically affect the perception (positively or negatively). We offer 20 different hairstyles to choose from, each with several color options.

Skin

A variety of skin tones and textures are available for the Avatars. Tone refers to the amount of melanin or pigment in the skin, while texture refers to the condition of the skin’s surface. The masculine skin type usually has facial hair.

In addition, you can adjust the brightness and the matte level of the skin to make the Avatar look more realistic. Lower the Matte slider to increase the glossiness of the skin. By default, these two options are set to 50%.

Overall Facial Structure

Digital DNA Blender allows you to blend the characteristics of various facial shapes, which were contributed to our library by scanning human actors and models. By combining different percentages (using the sliders) of the different phenotypes, you can achieve over 1 million unique looks.

The below table shows a preview of the characteristics of each phenotype set to 100% with a random choice of skin texture and hairstyle. This might help choose the characteristics (such as the face, eyes, nose, mouth, and head shape) of each phenotype into your unique Digital Person.

Eyes, nose, mouth, and head shape

There are indicative images for the eyes, nose, mouth, and head shape sliders. This makes it easier to decide what kind of features you want in your Digital Person. 

Best Practices

How do I get started?

1. Start with the aspects of the appearance that are dominant and have the biggest impact on the person’s appearance - skin texture, hairstyle, and clothing and background color.

2. Next, work on bone structure - the face icon (Overall face) and the head icon (Skull shape). 

3. Next, work on the mouth shape - this can be influenced by the Skull shape so you may need to go back and adjust your skull shape slightly

4. Next, work on the nose shape

5. Lastly, work on the eyes. The eyes are where you will likely spend a lot of your time and can have a huge impact on the final result.

Pro-tips

1. For the overall blend, aim for around 3-5 features (sliders) to be involved in your blend. Set one to be dominant.

2. For regional blending (eyes, mouth, nose, skull), you can push this number higher. 5-7 features (sliders) can be used to get the desired shape, but use them in small or differing amounts

3. Setting 5 sliders to 100% will just average all of them out, so try to weight the sliders where some are dominant.

4. Some shapes/features (sliders) are more masculine, some are more feminine. For regions like eyes, nose, and to a lesser extent mouth, this gender difference is less noticeable. However, for regions that can dramatically change the bone structure (Overall Blend &  Skull shape), this gender difference can be quite noticeable.

Guidelines

• If you start the blender and have all phenotypes set to 0, the system will show an average of all the phenotypes and display a blended face.

• If you set any one phenotype to a number above 0 (and rest to 0) then it automatically becomes 100% of that phenotype.

• If you set multiple phenotypes to above 0 then it'll blend it according to the values you set so you won't get 100% of any phenotype.

• Use the collect Digital DNA functionality to save/load a particular blend or use it as a starting point to create new Digital People. The Digital DNA can also be shared with colleagues working on Digital DNA Blender.

• Hovering over an image will give you a text description of that feature if you want to note it down or pass it on to a colleague

Publishing and Using your Custom Avatar

How to Publish

After customising an Avatar, it is time to publish it. This final step applies all the options selected during the creation process and builds the Avatar for use in your projects. Allow for at least 30 minutes for the building process. As soon as your Custom Avatar is ready, you will receive an email notification informing you that it is available for use. Sample email notification:

Using the Custom Avatar in your project

After the newly created Custom Avatar is built, anyone in your organization can use them in their projects. From the dashboard, navigate to New Project. All the Custom Avatars created within the organization are available under the Custom avatars section.

Editing Avatars

There is no straightforward way to edit the features of the avatar that have already been published. However, the Collect Digital DNA option allows you to encapsulate all the Blender settings that created that specific look and use it as a starting point for iterations. You can also send DNA to other Digital DNA Studio users so they can recreate the same look.

Collecting DNA from Digital DNA Studio

If you would like to use one of the avatars after it is published in Digital DNA Studio as a starting point:

1. Navigate to Digital DNA Studio > New Project (or Edit an existing project).

2. Click on the 3 dots within the profile picture and select Collect Digital DNA. This gives you the Digital DNA. Copy the DNA and save it in your preferred text editor.

3. To continue working on the avatar, go to the Dashboard > Create New Avatar. Then use the Loading Digital DNA feature of the Digital DNA Blender.

Collecting DNA from Blender

The Digital DNA can be collected at any time during the creation of the custom avatar by clicking the 3 dots on the right side of the page. Collect Digital DNA gives you the unique blend of the Digital person in an encoded format. Copy the DNA and save it in your preferred text editor. You can use this DNA to start a new Digital Person or to continue working on it later.

Loading Digital DNA

To load the Digital DNA of a Digital Person, simply paste the Digital DNA saved earlier and click Load. Now that the unique Digital Person is loaded, you can continue fine-tuning its appearance.

FAQs

How do I create great-looking Digital People?

Please watch our tutorial below

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I want to create an older/younger looking Digital Person, how do I do that?

On the facial structure: Children have larger eyes and larger skulls compared to adults whose eyes and skulls are smaller.

On the skin: Look for more defined wrinkles under the eyes (eyebags), around the mouth, and any permanent facial wrinkles that appear on a neutral face to indicate age. Youthful skin has a lot more elasticity and is unlikely to retain wrinkles when neutral.

I want to edit a preset avatar, how do I do that?

The Digital DNA Bank contains the Digital DNA for the Presets and also some cool-looking crowdsourced Digital People.

How do I share my custom avatar with a colleague?

Everyone within your organization will have access to all custom avatars you create. However if you wish to ‘send’ the settings for a custom avatar to someone else, use the Digital DNA feature to collect and share the Blender settings with your colleague. They can then further enhance the look of the Digital Person by loading the DNA into the Digital DNA Blender tool.

Can I delete a custom Digital Person after I’ve made it?

Not yet, this feature is coming soon.

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