👽Avatar Upload

In the Developer Portal, you can directly upload your avatars to preview the emotes from the User-Generated Emote feature directly on your characters.

When uploading an avatar in the Developer Portal, Kinetix needs to learn how it is built to perform a retargeting - to transfer the 3D animations of the emote from Kinetix's proprietary skeleton to your character's custom skeleton. To simplify the retargeting and make sure that your character's bones are perfectly understood by our algorithm, you will need to check and adjust the Bone Mapping, directly through the Developer Portal.

If you want to learn more about Kinetix's proprietary retargeting algorithm and bone mapping, head to Retargeting.

How to upload an avatar and adjust its bone mapping

To learn how to upload your avatar from A to Z, you can follow the steps from the video below:

Upload your avatar on the Developer Portal

1. First, log into your Developer Portal Account and head to the "Avatar Management" section.

2. There you will be able to click on "Upload an avatar".

3. Type the name you want to give to your avatar.

4. Select a .FBX file that contains your 3D character, in Y-up position and with skeleton (bones) and mesh, smaller than 10Mb.

5. Click on "done".

Adjust your character's Bone Mapping

Once you have uploaded your avatar (in a good format - a Y-up character in an FBX file), you will be redirected to the Bone Mapping pages, where you can check that your character has been correctly mapped by our retargeting algorithm, and adjust the bones if needed.

This step is necessary to be performed, in order to ensure a good quality of retargeting of animations on your avatar. We retarget animations from the Kinetix Avatar to your avatar using this mapping. Therefore, we encourage you to fully understand the Kinetix Avatar’s skeleton.

The Kinetix bones are as the following:

Mandatory bones:

Kinetix's skeleton main bones.

Additional Bones

Kinetix's skeleton "additional bones".

Hand bones

Kinetix's hand bones. Bone 0 is the closest to the palm, while bone 2 is always at the extremity of the finger.

You only need to map one hand: the other will be mapped accordingly.

Once you've understood how Kinetix's Avatars are built, and know what your custom character looks like, you are ready to proceed to the Bone Mapping.

STEP 1: Check that your avatar's Key Bones are correctly mapped.

On your screen, you will see your avatar, and around it several text boxes:

• The label of a text box is a Kinetix bone that needs to be mapped.

• The content of the text box is the name of your avatar’s bones.

Upon first landing on the bone mapping page, you’ll notice that we have automatically mapped some (if not all) of your avatar’s bones. We encourage you to double-check these to ensure the quality of the final result.

You can click on a bone and drag to connect to a text box, or you can click on a text box and drag to connect to a bone. You can also click on a text box to manually select a bone by its name, instead of dragging and searching for it.

When a text box is selected, you’ll see a small modal showing where it is ideally supposed to be mapped, according to the Kinetix Standard Avatar.

Be careful! It is not because all your bones are automatically mapped that it has been done without mistake. You need to check all of the bones and make sure that the bones mapped by the algorithm actually match. Mis-mapping a mandatory bone will severely damage the animation outputs.

STEP 2: Check that your avatar's Additional Bones are correctly mapped.

Simply drag the little dot next to Kinetix's bone names (on the left and right columns) and drop it on the corresponding bone on your character. When holding a dot, you can see where you have to plug it if you look at the picture that appears on the left/right-top corner of your screen.

In this example, this character does not include a "Spine2" bone. Since it's an optional bone, we can skip it without damaging the emote outputs.

Optional bones can be skipped, but it's always better to map them if your character's skeleton has them!

STEP 3: Check that your avatar's Hand Bones are correctly mapped.

Hand bones may or may not be mapped. However, they must be mapped if you would like to ensure your avatar’s fingers also follow the animations. For each finger, we have named the bones as 0, 1, 2 starting from the bone closest to the main hand bone. (For example, Index_0, Index_1, Index_2).

Here, my character's finger bones are named from 1 to 3, while Kinetix Standard Avatar's fingers are named from 0 to 2. Don't get confused by the names, and follow the hand picture!

STEP 4: Check the bone mapping by previewing an Emote on your character.

Before validating your bone mapping, you can preview it as your avatar plays 3 Emotes. It's a great occasion for you to check that bones are correctly mapped. If your character is acting weirdly, it means that something went wrong with the bone mapping! If needed, you are able to go back to the previous steps and adjust mid-mapped bones.

Avatar Processing time

Once you have validated your bone mapping, your avatar will be processing. In general, you can expect to wait from 2 to 5 minutes for your avatar to be processed and completely usable.

Please, do not hesitate to contact Ben if you need any help to map your avatar.

Contact-Aware Retargeting

Contact-Aware Retargeting is a special retargeting method that suits characters with a complex / uncommon morphology, resulting in meshes that expand far from the skeleton.

You can learn more about Contact-Aware Retargeting

Conditions to benefit from Contact-Aware Retargeting

If your game / apps follows the conditions below, you are eligible to Contact-Aware Retargeting:

• The avatars featured in your game do not have too many different skeletons & shapes. Contact-Aware Retargeting suits particularly games that have 1 or just a few different avatars. Note that 2 avatars with the same skeleton & shape, but different textures are counted as 1 single avatar.

• The avatars featured in your game cannot be customized though sliders that would affect the character's mesh.

• The avatar featured in the game are quite "unsual". In case your avatars are quite similar to Kinetix's "Sam" avatar (Male, thin/atheletic, 1.70 meters, ...), using Contact-Aware Retargeting would be irrelevant.

Note that if your game features a few different avatars, you do not specifically have to opt for the Contact-Aware Retargeting for all of them. You can keep the Standard one for all your avatars, except a few "unsual" ones that would require a dedicated approach.

How to get Contact-Aware Retargeting for your avatars

1. Request the Contact-Aware Retargeting

As of today, the Contact-Aware Retargeting is not directly accessible to games. Game have to contact Ben to access the feature.

If your game / app is eligible to Contact-Aware Retargeting, you may contact Ben from Kinetix's technical team, to compute your characters with the appropriate retargeting method.

As you contact Ben, do not forget to specify the ID of the avatars you want to have the Contact-Aware Retargeting enabled on. (Log into your Developer Portal -> go to "Avatar Upload" -> click on "Display Avatar ID").

Once they are ready, your avatars that benefit from the Contact-Aware Retargeting will appear on the Developer Portal, in the Avatar Upload section, with the "Premium" banner visible on their avatar card.

2. Integrate the avatars that benefit from Contact-Aware Retargeting into your game

For now, the Contact-Aware Retargeting is only available for games that integrated the Unity SDK. The feature will come soon on the Unreal Engine SDK.

To let your eligible avatars benefit from the Contact-Aware Retargeting, head to the corresponding section:

• Unity SDK: Using your custom uploaded avatar for Contact-Aware Retargeting