Tutorials

How To Use 3D Character Design Software To Avatars To Your Mobile App or Game

Get started with the Ready Player Me 3D Character Design Software for Android and iOS mobile apps and games based on Unity, Unreal Engine, or React Native.

If you ever worked on a mobile project that involved anything related to 3D, you know that there's much more to it than just dropping a few things into the Unity editor, Xcode or Android Studio and calling it a day. That's especially true if you work on a game with 3D graphics full of assets.

It's almost impossible to create hundreds of 3D objects by hand if you have limited resources. You're more likely to go to a place like the Unity Asset Store, which is great for finding assets like 3D models of different objects, environments, and characters to get your project going. But when you do that, you can run into another set of issues. For example – how to offer avatar customization to your players if you have got only 12 different options in the package from the assets store?

Free 3D Character Design Software For Your Mobile Game

Ready Player Me may be the answer to your 3D avatar needs. It's a cross-game avatar creator that works with Unity, React Native, Web, and Unreal Engine 4. It supports mobile, desktop, VR/AR, and even smart fridges (at least in theory). It's used by 1000+ companies, including VRChat, Warner Bros., SideQuest, and others.

Ready Player Me lets anyone can create a 3D avatar with a selfie and customize it to their liking. There are hundreds of customization options to choose from, like different hairstyles, outfits, hats, and so on.

If you're creating just a few characters for your game, Ready Player Me avatars are free to use for non-commercial projects (as long as you credit us). If you want to use the avatars for commercial projects, you can apply to become a partner, which will give you access to your own avatar creator with a partner subdomain. And – wait for it – that's free too.

Ready Player Me Partners also benefit from the platform's monetization options. Revenue from sales of premium customization assets is split between our partners based on players' engagement.

How To Make And Integrate Personal 3D Characters Into Your Mobile Game

With Ready Player Me, your users make their own characters using our avatar creator. You can integrate it directly into your product so that there's no need to leave to a different app or website to create an avatar. You can implement Ready Player Me into mobile apps and games in a few different ways:

  • Natively on iOS using Swift
  • Natively on Android using Kotlin
  • Using React Native
  • Using our Unity Avatar SDK + Unity WebView
  • Using the Web integration

How To Add 3D Characters To Your iOS, Android or React Native Application

Integrating Ready Player Me avatars into apps and games on both iOS and Android is similar. This method also applies to any apps based on React Native.

All you need to do is spawn an embedded web browser, which navigates to your partner subdomain. Your users will be able to create their avatar using the Ready Player Me platform. Once they are done with customization, the 3D model will be automatically imported to your application.

You can find more details and examples in our docs:

How To Add 3D Characters To Your Unity Mobile App Or Game

Ready Player Me avatars also work great in Unity-based applications. Our Unity Avatar SDK lets you integrate the Ready Player Me avatar creator directly into your game so that your players don't have to switch to another app or a web browser.

To get started with Ready Player Me avatars in your Unity project, head over to our docs. There, you can download the latest version of our Avatar SDK and learn how to set it up for your needs.

If you're looking at using the Unity WebView to integrate the Ready Player Me character creator directly into your app or game, you can watch our tutorials for Android and iOS.

How To Animate 3D Characters For Your Mobile App Or Game

Once you have integrated the avatars, you might want to bring more into them by adding some animations. Ready Player Me avatars come pre-rigged and are compatible with Adobe Mixamo, so adding animations is no problem. You can also take advantage of 52 Apple ARKit-compatible facial blendshapes that work great for facial tracking and animations.

Become a Ready Player Me Partner and Integrate 3D Characters Into Your Mobile App or Game

That's all you have to know to get started with integrating Ready Player Me avatars into your mobile app or game. Let us know in the Ready Player Me Developers Forum if you have any questions. We would love to hear about how you integrated the avatars into your project. And feel free to suggest other topics you would like us to cover in future blog posts.

If you want to use Ready Player Me avatars for your commercial project, apply to become a Ready Player Me partner here.