We at Avatar SDK hope you are well and safe during these challenging times! We reached out to tell you about three important updates to Avatar SDK:

• Full body avatars
• Lighting enhancement
• Unreal Engine beta test

Full Body Avatars

We are happy to announce a solution to generate rigged full body avatars from images. We are using the SMPL Model from Meshcapade to reconstruct realistic full body models. The body shape is unique for each avatar, reconstructed from an input image of the face/upper body. So far it is available only in the Cloud API, you can refer to the curl sample on how to reconstruct a full body model in the fbx format https://api.avatarsdk.com/samples/curl_body/.

A few important notes:

• The new model right now is not compatible with UMA2, it is based on the SMPL body topology with Head 2.0 topology (mobile subtype) for the head. The full body avatars topology does not depend on the input image. Also, this is a beta, and we expect to make changes to the topology in future releases to improve the quality of the model.
• We have noticed that the full body shape is much more accurate if you use height, weight and gender parameters as input. Although you can run reconstruction without these parameters, supplying them is highly recommended.
• We are working hard to implement the support of full body models in the Unity plugin, as well as in our offline products. Please bear with us, we should have some time estimates the next week.
• The full body avatars are based on Head 2.0, and so are available on the Pro subscription only. If you don’t have Pro subscription now, you can get 14 days trial online https://avatarsdk.com/pricing-cloud/ or request a 1 month trial by replying to this email with your Avatar SDK account name. 

Lighting enhancement

The lighting enhancement function is now available in the Cloud API! Just pass the “enhance_lighting” parameter during avatar creation https://api.avatarsdk.com/#avatar-modifications, and the function will attempt to make the input image lighting more uniform, removing some shadows and glare. This option is available on the Plus subscription and higher. 

Unreal Engine plugin beta test