Upgrade your avatar from 2D to 3D with Avatara

Avatars have been wildly popular over the past 5 years. Avatars started gaining popularity on forum sites and really took off when blogs came onto the scene. Traditionally though avatars have been 2D pictures of ourselves or 2D drawings. Not anymore, now there is a site that will turn your 2D avatar into a 3D avatar. What was once only possible if you were willing to pay big bucks to a design studio has now become free. Avatara is a website that allows you to create a 3D image of yourself in only a few small steps. They also allow you to automatically share your avatar across all your social networking sites. I gave Avatara a test run and here are the results.

After you have signed-up to be a member of Avatara (only a few fields to fill-out) you’re ready to begin creating your avatar. First you need to upload a photo of yourself. The photos should only be a face shot. Avatara provides a few tips on how you should take your photo. After you upload your photo you need to place a series of red dots on your face so your imagine can be digitized. Again, there are easy to follow guides to do this. Once you’re done the creation of the 3D imagine will begin. Avatara notifies you once the 3D rendering is done, which for me took a hour or two. To perform my test I took a photo of Megan Fox and here are the results:

As you can see the results are pretty damn good if I do say so myself. The 3D rendering strips away the background image and leaves you with a bald image of yourself. Don’t freak out, there are plenty of options for you at this point. You can do everything from adding hair, changing your eye color and adding body parts! All of this is done with preset images so you don’t have to worry about “drawing” or being a graphic designer. After you have created yourself in 3D it’s time to share your Avatar with the world. Using the “transport” feature you can instantly upload your avatar to your favorite social networking site.

Additionally, you have options to animate your avatar. I wouldn’t go that far if you’re just starting. Go ahead and create your 3D avatar and one you’re comfortable you can always go back and add animation. As you can see Avatara makes it extremely easy for anyone to create a 3D image of themselves. I give this site a big thumbs up! I’ll be interested to see how close everyone can make their avatar look to your real self.