While animated avatars aren’t completely new, you can now make an animated 3D avatar of yourself quick and easy at your home computer. It doesn’t even require any advanced or expensive computer, and I’m sure most PC’s that are 1-2 years old can handle it. In this text I will cover what you need to create a 3D avatar, as well as walk you through the process step-by-step.
This is the type of animated 3D avatar you will learn to create today.
Requirements
Creating your animated 3D avatar
The first workflow you need to open is the avatar maker (or emoji maker depending on where you download it), and it will look like this.
The workflow is pretty self explanatory, so long as you have all nodes and models installed. If anything shows up red, try to download or repair the nodes using ComfyUI manager.
Instant ID
Upload the image you want to base you avatar of, make sure that you have the IP adapter and ControlNet model for SDXL and that they are loaded. Decide if you want your CPU or GPU to handle the face analysis (I didn’t notice any huge difference).
Input
Download and load the TurboVision checkpoint and the Emoji LoRa. The trigger words “Emoji” and “Flat” are mutually exclusive. So when “Emoji” is part of your prompt, do not have “Flat” in your prompt and vice versa. When you use “Flat”, give a LoRA scale of 0.7-0.8. Alternatively, if you chose “Emoji” to be in your prompt, give a lower LoRA scale of 0.2-0.5.
Output
You can play around with these settings if you want to, but it’s not necessary. Just keep your image square, to make it easier later on. When ready, generate your base avatar.
Animating your avatar
Next you need to load the “Talking avatar” workflow, and make sure everything is installed correctly.
Again, the workflow is pretty self explanatory. But before you can proceed now, you need to record a short video clip of yourself saying something. You could also move your head back and forth and to the sides in this video, to get an idea of how it works. I would recommend to keep your first video under 10 seconds. Once you made sure everything works and that your settings are satisfied, you can make longer videos.
Save the video somewhere on your computer, and copy the path to the location of the video. Example:
c:\users\default\video\MyVideo.mp4Paste the path to your video in the “Load Video” node. You can leave the settings as they are, for now.
If you generate your animated avatar with all the settings as they are, you will get a split video where you see the original video and the avatar video next to each other. That might be fun the first time, but if you want to use your animated avatar for something you don’t want the extra video window.
To make sure that the avatar is the only output, you can rearrange the connections as below, and change the “inputcount” from 2 to 1.
Check out my text Making a LoRa to learn how to create high quality LoRa.