how to change avatar's appearance?

[Green]

Hi, I want to load 7 avatars of different appearance into the virtual environment.
In the resource folder under the vizard program, there is only one male and one female avatar. How can I change their appearance, like face, dress, color of the dress?

Thanks!

[Green]

I have posted this question for several days. Without resolving this problem, I cannot move on in my experiment. Could somebody help me?

[farshizzo]

You will need to either create your own avatar or purchase an avatar library.

To create your own avatar you will need to use a modelling tool like 3ds max and export the character using the Cal3D exporter available on our download page.

There are various existing avatar libraries available. Complete Characters offers 100 different characters that are ready to be used with Vizard.

[Green]

Thanks!

But, Are there any methods to modify in vizard the 'male.cfg' and 'female.cfg' which are already available to creat avatars of different appearance, like clothes, hair style? Would it be very difficult?

[IGoudt]

Vizard avatars are defined and loaded by a .cfg file. You can check male.cfg and vcc_male.cfg to see how such a .cfg looks like. Avatars consist of:

- a skeleton
- 1 or more meshes
- any number of animations
- 1 or more material files.

If you check a .cfg file you can discover which file in the avatar-path corresponds to a certain part of the avatar. The extension (.cmx, .csx, .cax, .tga, .caf, .csf, .cmf) depends on the software used to create and export the avatar, but Vizard supports a lot of those types. I *think* it's possible to replace the material file of for example male.cfg with your own texture, but I am not too sure about that, because of offsets, rotations, sizes, etc since maybe if you know: texture files can look quite strange when you open them.

So in the config file that would be:

remove:
material=male_shirt_blue.crx

add:
material=male_shirt_yellow.tga

and add the file male_shirt_yellow.tga to the path of the avatar
If you use the Vizard Live Characters, you get the PSD (photoshop) sources of the avatars which you can easily change and export.