Toon avatar open source
Lead: These are the top 10 open-source projects that solve parts of the toon avatar problem. No single project does all of it. Projects 1, 2, 4 and 6 together cover the full path from one picture to a walking toon character with separate, swinging locs.
The top 10
| # | Project | What it solves | License | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | StdGEN and StdGEN++ (CVPR 2025) | One picture to a 3D character with body, clothes and hair as separate meshes, in about 3 minutes | Open code and weights | Best match for the model itself |
| 2 | HairDeck (October 2026) | One picture to stylized hair cards with spring bones, so the hair swings. Exports GLB or VRM | Apache-2.0 weights | Best match for the locs |
| 3 | CharacterGen (SIGGRAPH 2024) | Turns any pose in the picture into a clean A-pose before it builds the 3D model | Open | Fixes pose problems |
| 4 | Make-It-Animatable | Rigs any humanoid mesh to a skeleton you choose, so our walk and run clips work | Open | Rigging to our skeleton |
| 5 | UniRig (SIGGRAPH 2025) | Auto-rigging and skin weights for any mesh | Permissive, commercial use allowed | Rigging, second choice |
| 6 | VRM with three-vrm and MToon (pixiv) | The web standard for toon avatars: toon shading, outlines, hair spring physics, face expressions | MIT | What the facility should render |
| 7 | M3 CharacterStudio | Web avatar creator for VRM with swappable parts, built on three.js and React | MIT | Replacement for our creator screen |
| 8 | VRoid Studio | Desktop VRM creator with hair modelled as strand groups. Anime style | Free, not open source. You own what you make | Fast hand-made test |
| 9 | 100 Avatars (Polygonal Mind) | 167 stylized rigged avatars in glTF that work with Mixamo clips | CC0 | Test bodies and reference |
| 10 | CharMorph | Open Blender character creator with morphs and Rigify rigs | GPL tool, CC0 or CC-BY bases | Realistic bases only, low fit |
How they fit together
What I checked and what I did not
- Checked
- each project exists, what it says it does, and its stated license (web search, November 2026)
- Not checked
- I have not run any of them yet. HairDeck is new (late October 2026) and comes from one paper
- Needs
- 1 to 5 need an NVIDIA GPU. This Mac cannot run them. A rented cloud GPU costs money, and I give you the price before I start
- Already tried
- TRELLIS and Hunyuan3D on free GPUs. Good shapes, but they paint the face flat and join the locs into one lump