Today we want to announce the release of the new Head 2.0 avatars!

Head avatars 2.0 take the best of Head 1.1 and Face avatars. They look exactly like Head 1.1, but now a hairstyle is represented with a separate mesh, and a bust can be removed. 

Moreover, the mesh topology of a head is always the same. This allows to customize a hairstyle and facial hair, add accessories such as glasses, and build full-body avatars! The Head 2.0 is already released to the cloud, currently available for subscribers of the Pro plan. Use the pipeline=head_2.0 and pipeline_subtype=head/mobile to compute a Head 2.0 avatar! More details about new subtypes are available in the documentation. The support for Head 2.0 in our offline SDKs and the Standalone Server will be added in the next few weeks. Click “Purchase” on the web page https://avatarsdk.com/offline-sdk/ to get a quote!

The subtypes of the beta version (e.g. `pipeline_subtype=beta/mobile`) are deprecated now and will be removed from the cloud on September 1st, 2019. 

Also we are deprecating the Static pipeline and the Head 1.0 and 1.1 pipelines to make way for more usable and maintainable alternatives in a new version. We are focusing on delivering better experience with this update, with more impressive changes to come, you can expect a better design and uniformity moving forward. Today we are announcing an official turn-down date of February 1st, 2020, for these pipelines.

If you are using the Head 1.0 or 1.1 avatars, we recommend you to switch to Head 1.2 version. You can find more details in our previous post: https://avatarsdk.com/blog/2019/07/24/head-1-2/ 

We also advise to try the Head 2.0 or the Face avatars instead of the Static pipeline. If you have any issues with switching from a deprecated pipeline, please let us know with the support@avatarsdk.com email! 

Starting from today we also split our Unity plugin into two different packages, the cloud and offline versions. Because of this change update notifications will not work for your previous versions of the plugin. Please download manually the new cloud or offline Unity plugin. The new cloud version with support for Head 2.0 is already available. We plan to release the offline package in several weeks, it will be available for download from your developer dashboard. 

We also updated the online demo on our website, now it allows you to simply create busts with Head 1.2 and heads with Head 2.0 pipeline based on your photos. Try it now!